


The Best Laid Plans

by Dodoa



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF John, BAMF Sherlock, Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, Case Fic, Doctor John, Drug Use, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injured Sherlock, John knew - nothing changed, Minisode: Many Happy Returns, Missing Scene, Season three still happened, Secret Messages, Texting, Undercover Missions, Will go even more AU once it reaches season 4, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:10:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 77,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4544349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dodoa/pseuds/Dodoa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Sherlock had told John about his plan to fake his death and kept him in the loop during his exile?</p><p>The basic premise of this story is that Sherlock told John that he was alive, but season three is still going to happen, with only very minor alterations. Of course the motivations for some of the characters actions will be different, but nearly all of the scenes shown on the show will remain the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Kitty Riley's Flat

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, this is the first work I've posted, so if I did anything wrong with the ratings or tags or something please tell me. Also, english isn't my native language and I don't have a beta, so if you find any mistakes with grammar or vocabulary, I'd be grateful for corrections. That also goes for anything else, concrit will always be appreciated. So that said, I really hope you enjoy my story.

Fugitives, they were fugitives now. The fact was only starting to sink in now, as they weren’t running and hiding anymore. Now they were only hiding. In, what appeared to be, Kitty Riley’s flat. Still handcuffed together.

Of course John had gone along with Sherlock’s harebrained plan, playing the hostage, he always did. If there even was a plan, and John hoped to god there was, even if it was cockeyed and only half thought through, because Sherlock’s cockeyed and half thought trough plans tended to be better than other people’s most sensible ones and if John was completely honest with himself, they were a lot more fun too.

So if there was a plan, John needed to know what it was, so he didn’t unknowingly jeopardize it. Somewhere in between “My hostage” and “Sherlock: The shocking truth” John’s brain had switched over to what he called military mode, which meant, first and foremost one thing: triage. Prioritise the important things:

First: Don’t get caught. Taken care of for the moment. The police wouldn’t look for them here, but once Ms. Riley got home and they’d confronted her, they’d need a new hideout. Which led to:

Second: Find out the plan or, if none exists, make one.

“Sherlock?”

“Shhh”

“But...”

“Quiet, now!”

So that had gone over well. Apparently Sherlock was thinking and John wasn’t important enough to be graced with any part of the thought process, until the big reveal. Just like usually, and usually John didn’t mind too much, but this whole situation was so far from usual, this was Moriarty and John was unpleasantly reminded of The Pool, of how Sherlock’s unwillingness to share his plans had resulted in them being almost blown up. No, not again, John wouldn’t be caught flat footed this time. He didn’t care if he made Sherlock angry, he needed to know and if Sherlock wouldn’t talk to him voluntarily, he’d make him. If this was what it took, he’d out-stubborn Sherlock Holmes!

“Sherlock, I need-“

“Thinking!”

“-to know, what-“

“Shut up!”

“-the plan- mmph”, John glowered at Sherlock, who had his free left hand pressed to John’s mouth in order to shut him up, while his other hand, which was still attached to John’s via handcuff, was rummaging through his coat. John decided that if the hand wasn’t removed from his mouth in the next ten seconds, he’d resort to playground rules and bite the bastard. Seriously, the nerve he had! Luckily for Sherlock he was a fast typer and so, just before John’s inner countdown reached zero, a phone was shoved into his hands and the hand from his mouth removed. John looked at the screen and read:

_Don’t talk, bugs probable._

He had barely registered the words when the phone was snatched away again and Sherlock began typing furiously.

_Article part of Moriarty’s plan, disgracing me, most of it even true, except for lies, some classified info, didn’t get that through research, Moriarty, doesn’t leave chess pieces unobserved, bugs possibly cameras, shield phone with your hand._

_So what’s the plan?_ , John wrote back after deleting the last note, and so they started writing and deleting, back and forth.

_Undecided, too many variables still open._

_Can I help?_

_No._

_I need to know what you’re planning though, even if it’s vague. So I don’t get in the way._

_Be yourself, react naturally; I’ll calculate your reactions into the plan._

_Sherlock, you can’t possibly know all of my reactions beforehand!!!_

_If I ask you how you’d react now, you wouldn’t act naturally later, or smell a rat if I try to manipulate you and the plan might not work!_

_But what if you’re wrong? What if I don’t react the way you need me to?_

_Fine, I’ll check that now! But you have to react exactly the way you say you will._

_Alright_

_If someone important got hurt, and I refused to come with you, would you leave?_

_Important to you or me?_

_Both._

_Why do you refuse, then?_

_I don’t care about them._

_Wait that’s not right you just said important to us both! You are trying to get me out of the way so you can do something stupid! So no, I won’t leave, I might drag you with me by your ears but I won’t leave you to confront him on your own again!_

_Damn!_

_Surprise you, did I?_

_No you wouldn’t be thinking that clearly in that situation you only saw through it because you’re calm and collected now, that’s exactly what I meant when I said asking you now would skew the results!_

_Well in that case you just have to tell me what to do now and I promise I’ll do it. So what was this question about, what kind of plan is this?_

_Getting you to leave, in order to draw Moriarty out, don’t know if I’ll need it yet, I’d have someone call you posing as a paramedic, telling you Mrs. Hudson was shot._

_Jesus Christ!_

_Now I need a new way to get you out of the way, or to where I need you._

_What’s wrong with just telling me?_

_Bugs, and it might need to look like you weren’t loyal anymore, that I’m losing support, that’s his plan, making me completely alone and friendless, making sure I have nowhere to go, before finishing me off._

_Alright, then let’s use your original plan. If I get a call from a paramedic about Mrs. Hudson being shot, I’ll go where they tell me to go. And if it helps I’ll start an argument before I leave._

_Thank you._

_Should I come back once I’ve realised you played me?_

_Yes._

_Fine, what else?_

_If you want me to tell you that, You need to promise me something._

_What?_

_Do you trust me?_

_Of course I do!_

_With your life?_

_Yes!_

_Enough that you would do anything I ordered, without hesitation, even if you didn’t understand why?_

_Within reason, yes._

_No, not within reason! Generally and absolutely!_

_Alright, fine I trust you that much, but I will want a damn good explanation later and if the reason doesn’t satisfy me there will be consequences!_

_Promise me._

_Fine, I promise. Now ask._

_On a scale from one to ten, how upset would you be if I died?_

_10 You better not plan on doing anything stupid!!!_

_John, I need an honest answer here, not what you think I want to hear!_

_10_

_Really?_

_Yes._

_Would it be better if I died for you?_

_12 At least!_

_What? Why would that be worse? Shouldn't you be grateful?  
_

_Survivor’s guilt, I’ve never dealt well with that. Also there's an inherent problem with dying for your loved ones: If they wouldn't do the same for you, they probably aren't worth it and if they would, they'd probably rather you didn't.  
_

_Do you know how inconvenient that is? You just made at least three of my plans unworkable._

_Well I guess you’re glad you asked now before you did something stupid you can’t take back. So just to make this clear: YOUR DEATH ISN’T AN EVEN REMOTELY ACCEPTABLE OUTCOME!!!_

_What if I wasn’t actually dead?_

_Like faking your death? Same thing if I don’t know you did it._

_And if I told you I was actually alive?_

_Depends on the circumstances, but definitely better._

_It might not even come to that; there are seventeen other plans that would be favourable to this one right now._

_Good! Also don’t just vanish completely, if you have to do that, keep me informed, that would make it much easier. And come back!_

Before John could pass the phone back to Sherlock, they heard a door opening and John just shoved the phone back into Sherlock’s coat pocket, before the door opened, the light went on and shit hit the fan.


	2. Lazarus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I decided to go with the version Sherlock gave to Anderson, in regards to how he did it, because it is the only reasonable explanation they gave us on the show and I can see Sherlock telling Anderson the truth, simply because he knows he'd never believe him.

Molly was standing by the doors of the morgue, faking a coffee break with a half-full cup of disgusting vending machine coffee, waiting for a signal, hoping it wouldn’t be “Lazarus”, that one of the other 12 options Sherlock had mentioned would be the one to play out and making sure the morgue would be empty, should it be needed. She had broken more laws in the last few hours than she had in her whole life before today. Under Sherlock’s instructions she had hacked into police records to find a body, requested a transfer of said body under a false name and written a fake autopsy report and death certificate and she didn’t regret a single thing. Of course, now that there was nothing left to do but wait, she couldn’t quite help the nerves, the endless “what ifs”, the fear of being caught, but she told herself that she didn’t care, that she would never regret helping Sherlock, possibly saving his life, even if she should lose her job over it, because Sherlock was more important, Sherlock mattered, not just to her, but to the world. Molly told herself that that wasn’t just stupid infatuation speaking, that she wasn’t blinded by unrequited love and she believed herself, because she wasn’t the only one believing in Sherlock Holmes, because there was John too, who was so much closer to Sherlock than she was, who knew him so much better and who hadn’t left his side until he was sent away. Molly would do just as well, filling a position only she could fill, precisely because no one ever thought she could matter.

After what seemed an incredibly long time, but in reality couldn’t have been more than half an hour, since she only had to refresh the odour of the morgue once, despite the strong ventilation system, she got a text.

_Lazarus_

Molly cursed silently to herself and hurried to get the body with Sherlock’s spare clothes into position behind the window, where she was soon joined by a burly man from the homeless network and together they waited for Sherlock to fall. Once he had, they pushed the corpse out after him; well the nameless homeless guy did most of the pushing, and Molly wondered what she was still doing there. Afterwards Molly hurried to take the now empty stretcher back to the morgue and waited for the others to bring Sherlock in.

The Homeless network handed the stretcher over to Molly as soon as they could, clearly reluctant to brave the pungent air that was wafting through the open doors of the morgue and she pushed the very realistic looking body of Sherlock Holmes inside. Who immediately shattered the illusion of lifelessness by screwing up his nose and asking: “Mr. Peterson?”

“Yeah, he kept people out alright.” Molly explained while handing Sherlock a wet towel.

“Week-old corpses don’t tend to be the best company, especially if they spent most of that time unrefrigerated.” Sherlock remarked with a smirk, his face still smeared with blood.

“That’s what I thought, no chance of anyone lingering longer than absolutely necessary if I take him out from time to time. It should dissipate soon though, until then you can use the office if you want a place where you can breathe through your nose, just don’t open the door more than necessary. Right sorry, I’m rambling; I’ll just shut up now. Will you be alright here for a while? I still need to get John.”


	3. Blood on the Pavement

John didn’t know how long he had been sitting there, staring at the blood on the pavement, waiting for this nightmare to end. The words “Goodbye John” were echoing in his skull, drowning out any other voices who might point out that Sherlock had said it was all a magic trick, that they had talked about the possibility of Sherlock having to fake his death only hours ago. All these things didn’t register; there was just “Goodbye John”, a black figure barrelling towards the ground and blood on the pavement.

People were moving around him, talking to him maybe, but he barely noticed until someone started to repeatedly call his name. John looked up and saw Molly – it was Molly calling and – tugging? She was tugging on his hand, silently urging him to follow, to leave the blood on the pavement behind and John was incapable of resistance. So he followed, hoping Molly would know the way out of this nightmare. He followed blindly, not caring where they were going as long as it was away, away from the blood on the pavement and “Goodbye John”. Molly was talking to him now, in hushed tones, going silent when they passed by other people, something about going to see Sherlock, but that didn’t make any sense, did it? So he followed blindly, not understanding, until they reached the doors of the morgue.

The morgue, where all the dead bodies were...

Where they would bring the recently deceased to be cut open and examined so they would give up all of their secrets...

The recently deceased...

Blood on the pavement...

Going to see Sherlock...

NO!

John stopped dead in his tracks.

“No, I can’t...” it came out as a choked whisper.

Molly either hadn’t heard or didn’t care, because she continued to pull him along, one hand already on the door.

“Please, don’t...” John tried again, to no avail; Molly just let out an exasperated sigh, opened the door and bodily pushed him through, silently closing the door after him.

The first thing that hit John was the smell; one never forgets the smell of decomposing bodies, it’s the kind of smell that will linger at the back of your throat for days, long after the source is removed. It was a smell, that even after years as an army doctor and countless crime scenes, John had never gotten used to. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing through his mouth, trying to keep the memories in check.

“Hello John.”

John’s eyes snapped open at the achingly familiar voice; a voice he thought he might never hear again and he caught sight of Sherlock on the other end of the room, still sitting on the stretcher they had carted him away on, seemingly frozen in place, like an apparition that could vanish any moment, blood still staining his coat and weighing down his hair. John stumbled back against the door, breath coming in harsh too fast gasps each one filling his mouth with the smell of death, blinking rapidly, trying to determine whether any of this was real. That’s when life came into the frozen figure at the other end of the morgue.

“John, it’s alright, I’m alive, John, listen to me!”

Sherlock was walking towards him now, coming closer, but he seemed to be slipping further away instead, his voice fading out to nothing but a whisper, the world going fuzzy around the edges. The medical professional part of John’s mind was telling him that he was hyperventilating, that he was going to pass out if he didn’t get his breathing under control, but how could he, if every breath was fouler than the last and nothing made sense. He tried reaching out to Sherlock, the apparition, anything but his grasping hand only met with thin air instead of warm flesh or a cotton coat and he stumbled forward into nothing thinking: “Not real after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couldn't resist a little nod to ACD canon there.


	4. After the fall

This wasn’t going according to plan at all! John was supposed to walk in, yell at Sherlock for a bit for scaring him and then they were supposed to sit down and plan. Then Sherlock would leave and John would be escorted home by a concerned Lestrade, who would have been called in by an equally 'concerned' Molly. At least that had been the plan up until the moment when instead of getting angry, John had fainted on him. After he had caught John he had relocated them to the small office in the hope that the less putrid air in there would prompt John to wake up faster. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

When John’s pulse and breathing pattern indicated his return to the world of the waking, Sherlock positioned himself so he’d be the first thing John would see once he opened his eyes, thinking it would be better to dispel any doubts about his continued existence right away and softly said his name. Blue eyes slowly blinked open and struggled to focus. Confusion, shock, fear and relief flitted over Johns face in rapid succession until it finally settled on anger.

“You absolute bastard!” John seethed while struggling to his feet; apparently they were back on the plan, leave it to John to be unpredictable and predictable at the same time, Sherlock thought with a small smile to himself.

“Now what are you smiling about, you think this is funny, don’t you? Of course you do, this is all just one big joke to you isn’t it...”

Sherlock let John throw abuse at him, occasionally filing away a particularly creative swear or insult for later perusal, until he was sufficiently calmed down to engage in proper conversation.

“I think I owe you an apology, I didn’t realise it would affect you so much.”

“What part of ‘ten’ didn’t you get Sherlock?”

“I thought you were referring more to the long term consequences, which is why I endeavoured to keep the deception as short as possible.”

“Why not leave it out completely, ever thought of that?”

“You’re not nearly a good enough actor to pull that off, it’s already a big enough risk letting you in at all, but having you play authentic shock when your live depends on the credibility of your performance? That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

“What?”

“Oh right, that was Moriarty’s plan. First destroying my reputation, then proving it with my suicide, quite brilliant actually; now how do you make someone commit suicide, it’s not like he could threaten my life. So he decided to threaten someone else, I’ve got to admit he went a little over the top there, targeting you would have been entirely sufficient, but in his defence he still had all those hitmen sitting around, so why not use them. That was his ultimatum, three bullets, three gunmen, three victims, the other ones were Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade in case you were wondering; the only way to call them off was to jump, because Moriarty wasn’t going to do it. Of course I tried to evade it, convince him to call them off, but he forced my hand, by eating his gun and –“

“Wait, so Moriarty is dead?”

“Yes.”

“So, where’s the problem, he’s gone, he can’t reach us anymore.”

“Now that is where you are sorely mistaken, John. While the man, the spider might be dead, the organisation, the web still lives on and one can still get caught in its threads. The network must have been more or less self-sufficient already, before his death, it’s too big for one person to control it all, he might have known where every thread was at any time, but it’s logistically impossible for every order to have gone through him. It will continue to exist on its own, it might splinter into sub fractions, but it won’t die, it’s like the hydra, cut off one head and two more will grow. As long as Moriarty has people who are reasonably competent and unfailingly loyal, no one can be safe, they will want revenge for their boss and unlike Moriarty himself, they won’t be subtle about it.”

“So what do we do now?”

“ _We_ do nothing. _I_ will leave and take down the net, with some help from Mycroft’s contacts; _you_ will go home and ‘grieve’ or whatever it is you do when your friends die.”

“No, nope, you’re not leaving me here, you hear? I won’t let you go alone; I’m coming with you!”

“No John, they will be watching you, you won’t be able to leave the country without a very good reason.”

“So we’ll fake my death too, won’t be hard to believe, the way the newspapers always portrayed us.”

“No, we’d be too conspicuous together, alone I’ll be able to fly under the radar, blend in, but together... Besides, how many languages do you speak? It’s an international network, John, I’ll probably need to learn at least two new ones myself to have a chance.”

“So is that it, I only slow you down?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know that! But we don’t have time for this discussion now, I have to leave in a few minutes and you can’t stay in here forever either. I need you to stay here and keep an eye on Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade, if you left, by faking your death or otherwise, that would only put them in unwarranted danger. You’ll also be the main contact of the homeless network, you know their usual fees, and they’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”

“Alright, fine, I get it, I’m more useful here, but if you do need me, I know you’re saying you won’t but if you do, how will you contact me.”

“Let me think... Would it be plausible for you to bury yourself in work in an attempt to get over my death?”

“Keeping busy so I don’t have to think? Sounds like me. Yeah.”

“Start attending medical conferences as often and as internationally as you can, always check the invitations very carefully, if there is a misspelled word, some medical term, nothing spell-check would pick up on, that’s the codeword, if someone whispers it to you in passing, follow them, they’ll lead you to me. If I only need to pass on information, I'll go through the homeless network. Now is there anything else you need to know?”

“How do I contact you? You know, in case I notice something potentially dangerous. I can’t very well just contact Mycroft, if you’re right and I’ll be watched. Could I just pass it on to the homless network? Would they be able to reach you?”

“No, that line of communication will only work in one direction, since I won't be able to keep a phone number for any length of time. You can change the privacy settings on your blog, make private posts, right?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Do that; anything that happens to you, even if you don’t think it’s significant, it will be less suspicious that way, act as if you’re only doing it for yourself, you know, try to get your therapist to suggest it if you can.”

“If it’s on private, how will you access it?”

“Please John, give me some credit!”

“Right, yeah. Um, one more thing, can I try to clear your name, or would that be counterproductive?”

“It will need to be cleared at some point, but Mycroft can take care of it, produce evidence the police can’t even dream of. If there is an investigation, be helpful and tell them the truth, minus the bit where I’m not actually dead, but don’t try to start a movement or something, it certainly won’t help me and it might put you in danger, which is the exact thing –“, they were both startled by the doors to the morgue opening. Sherlock watched John cast about frantically for a place to hide six feet of supposedly dead detective, knowing it was futile as there wasn’t even enough space under the desk for him to fit.

John hissed: “Hide behind the door, I’ll distract them.”

“And how will you explain your presence here?”

“Um, looking for Molly? Think I might get away with acting confused and in shock, considering”, John shot Sherlock a pointed look.

“Sherlock? John? You still here?” came Molly’s anxious whisper from the next room and both men let out relieved sighs before opening the door between the office and the morgue.

“Oh thank god, for a moment there I thought you’d left already. Sherlock, your Escape is in the ambulance bay and they said to get you quickly, because they can’t linger there long without arousing suspicion, so you’d better hurry, and... Do you have everything you need?”

“I think so, yes. Molly you can tell John anything he wants to know in case I forgot to mention anything”, Sherlock responded, while lying down in an open body bag on a stretcher and waiting for Molly to zip it closed. John intercepted Molly before she could finish hiding Sherlock’s face with the thick black plastic: “Listen to me Sherlock! You are not going to take any stupid risks; you will not risk your life, trying to be clever. You mister, for probably the first time in your life, are going to be careful, because I won’t be there to have your back, you understand? And if I find out that you got yourself killed out of pure stupidity, I will drag you out of hell, just so I can kick your sorry arse, and murder you with my own hands! Are we clear?”

“Goodbye John”, and with that the gap in the plastic was pulled closed over his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That last sentence would have worked so much better in german, because in the german version of the show Sherlock's 'last words' are: "Auf Wiedersehen, John", which in everyday use means "Goodbye John", justl like in the english version, but if you look at the roots of the expression "auf ein Wiedersehen" it can be roughly translated to "[we part] in the hope that we will meet again" and that would have been so fitting.


	5. Messages, sent into space

John spent the first two days after Sherlock’s ‘death’ in his armchair in the living room of 221B, barefoot, not talking, barely eating, staring at the empty chair opposite and generally doing his best to appear as shell-shocked as possible, while trying to remember the exact ‘whats’ and ‘whens’, ‘how bads’ and ‘how longs’ of previous loss, and god there was a lot of that. He revisited every friend he lost, every patient he failed to save, analysing his immediate and long term reactions, looking for his most common coping mechanisms and timing his progression through the stages of grief. Of course, none of those experiences could be really compared to losing Sherlock the way he had, but they made a solid starting point for the performance that would be required of John in the coming months, maybe years. John was aware that this was probably the most difficult thing he’d ever done; this wasn’t like lying to his therapist for three hours a week, or putting on a persona for a case, he wouldn’t be able to come home afterwards and laugh with Sherlock about the suspects face, when he realised... this was a 24/7 job, ‘complete immersion in the role’ as his drama obsessed university girlfriend had called it, he would have to stay in character, even if he thought no one was watching so he wouldn’t slip up when someone was. So he planned, created a plausible timeline for ‘getting over it’ including everything from how much he would be allowed to sleep to the amount of nagging it would take Greg to get him to go out to the pub with him.

On day three he packed a suitcase and told Mrs. Hudson that he needed a few days away from Baker Street. He didn’t intend to return any time soon. The flat felt empty without Sherlock’s dominating presence, and if it was this bad when John knew that Sherlock was alive and would return eventually, if everything went according to plan, John couldn’t even begin to imagine how much worse it would be if Sherlock had actually died that day, but he was sure, he wouldn’t be able to stay in the flat. So he left. Mrs. Hudson tried to convince him to stay of course, and it hurt John more than he cared to admit to leave her behind in the empty flat.

 

* * *

 

For the first few weeks John kept receiving notes, little scraps of paper, hastily scribbled on, slipped into his hand by the always present homeless network when he left the cheap hotel he was staying at until he could find a flat, which he was planning to delay as long as possible to keep up his facade of ‘not coping’. Sometimes he got more than one note a day, sometimes there was radio silence for three or four days.

_moved out I see, good choice, removes focus from H_

_slump your shoulders more, walk more slowly, don’t make eye contactwhen you talk to people  
_

_“He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him.” Really John? Good call on disabling the comments though_

_don’t be too open with that therapist, you never were before, would be suspicious_

_don’t you think it’s too early to return to work yet?_

_oh getting them to send you home, clever_

_M refused me the right to attend my own funeral, that has to be illegal somehow_

_I even tried to bribe him with cake_

_I’m sure I didn’t miss anything, I could probably extrapolate your eulogy from your blog posts_

_good performance with the imbecile, could have sworn that was genuine fury_

_nice speech at the grave, very believable, did your therapist tell you to do that?_

_leaving L tomorrow, don’t be an idiot_

John burned them all after reading. Two days after he got the last message, he posted his first private blog post.

 

* * *

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/03july

So Ella talked me into continuing this, but at least I could convince her that doing it publicly would be a bad idea. I’m getting too much media attention as it is. Vultures, all of them! And it’s not like you can explode in their faces when they get annoying, they’ll think they hit a nerve, when in reality it wasn’t what they said, their presence is hitting a nerve, their very existence is! But they don’t care, they’ll record it and twist it and print it, not realising that their actions have consequences, that there are lives behind their headlines, actual human lives, and they don’t care about that at all!

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/04july

I had to stop there yesterday. I told Ella I can’t write about what happened and that was getting too close. I’m supposed to write down everything that happens to me, but that’s the thing, I’m back to: Nothing happens to me. Apart from some especially determined reporters still hounding me, trying to get that exclusive that will make their careers, nothing is happening.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/07july

I’m still making two cups of tea every morning.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/08july

I’ll finally go back to work tomorrow. The last time I tried didn’t really go that well; Sarah told me I looked like crap and sent me home. I’ve practically been begging her to let me come back ever since, not my proudest moments, but I need something to do, something to occupy my mind, or I’ll go crazy. I’ll try to get some sleep tonight so she won’t be able to complain this time.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/11july

Work went much better than last time, which admittedly isn’t saying much, but I think it’s helping. At the very least it passes the time. I’ll ask for more shifts next week.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/16july

A new nurse started working at the surgery today, her name is Mary Morstan. There’s not much to tell about her really, she seems competent, gets on with the rest of the staff, that’s it really, but since she’s the most unusual thing that happened all week...

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/18july

Just came off a double shift, I’m so knackered I think I might actually be able to sleep.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/20july

A reporter followed me all the way from the surgery to the hotel today; he even got on the tube at rush hour in order to continue talking at me, seriously I’m kind of amazed by the mans bloody-mindedness, I mean I still wanted to strangle him, but yeah.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/21july

They moved me to a different room; apparently there were complaints about the noise at night. Guess I have to be grateful no one's called the police yet.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/24july

I had lunch with Mary today, she’s only employed part time and her shifts didn’t really match mine last week, so I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to her. It feels good to talk to someone who doesn’t know. She was working with Doctors without Borders for the last six months, so she was far away from all of that.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/27july

I had most of my shifts with Mary this week and she told me a lot more about her experience in south Sudan. It sounds very interesting.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/29july

I’ve been thinking about getting out of London for a while. It was actually Mary who gave me the idea and I briefly thought about joining MSF like she did. I went as far as looking at their requirements and current projects, but if I’m being honest with myself I’m really not ready for that kind of thing. Getting out of London sounds good though. Like really, really good, but I can’t see myself going on a holiday. Doing nothing actually sounds like the worst possible idea right now. So not a holiday. How does one get out of the city, when it’s not a holiday or a family obligation?

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/03august

I saw an announcement for a medical conference in Brighton at the clinic today. It’s in two weeks and I’m thinking about going, if only to get out of London for a bit.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/06august

Greg’s been badgering me to come to the pub and I know I should go, but I couldn’t bring myself to text back yet, because I know what’s going to happen. He’s going to try and apologise and I don’t think I can take that.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/08august

Got my ticket for the conference. It’s not a big affair, but I’m still looking forward to it. It’s probably going to be my highlight of the month. And how pathetic is that.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/09august

Texted Greg back. He was starting to sound worried, so... Drinks. On Saturday. Wish I could say that I’m not dreading it.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/12august

Surprisingly enough, yesterday evening was... not horrible. Yes, “not horrible” is an apt description. There was a football match on, so it was easy enough not to talk about anything. Which is pretty much the only positive thing I can say about it.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/14august

I’m leaving for the conference tomorrow morning and I’ve still got to pack.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/18august

When I came home yesterday evening I just fell straight into bed and I didn’t wake up until the morning. Small mercies. The conference itself was quite interesting despite being a small affair. I think I’ll do that again soon; it’s good to be busy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MSF actually had people in south Sudan in 2012, I did my research.
> 
> Obviously the links to the blog posts don't work, they are set on private after all ;-), but the layout of the addresses is taken from the official blog.


	6. Secret identities and other problems

Of course John had known that he wouldn’t meet Sherlock at the first medical conference or the second, or the third, after all he’d signed up for those himself, never got an invitation, but he still couldn’t help being a bit disappointed. After all he had made his intention to attend clear on the blog and some part of him had hoped that Sherlock would just turn up out of nowhere in his room, scare him half to death and then sweep him up in some grand adventure, like he always had. Sometimes he wondered bitterly if Sherlock was even reading the posts, or if that had just been a way of placating him, so he would cooperate, but if he was completely honest with himself, John was worried sick about Sherlock. He hadn’t heard from Sherlock at all, since he had received that last note, and Sherlock had left London, presumably to get to the ‘fun’ part of his plan, the part that involved less sitting around and thinking and more running after people twice his size without backup. The man had no self preservation instinct at all and John didn’t delude himself, that his little speech before Sherlock’s departure would have changed anything about that. And what if something did happen? Would anyone even know to inform him? He’d just assumed that Mycroft knew about his involvement, but Sherlock hadn’t actually mentioned it. What if Sherlock died out there and no one would think to tell him, because no one knew that he knew?

* * *

 

**Subject: Infectious Diseases in Primary Care 2012 – Invitation**

John barely avoided spilling his cup of tea over his laptop when he opened his e-mail account, though his hand wasn’t as fortunate. He briefly contemplated running cold water over the irritated skin, but decided he had to read this right now, because this had to be Sherlock. He hadn’t been attending medical conferences for long enough to receive random invitations yet, maybe if he kept this up a year he’d find his way into some of the e-mail distribution lists, but at the moment? It just had to be Sherlock.

_...the suppression of the antiviral response by an influenza histon mimic..._

In the end John had to read the invitation three times before he found the codeword. _Histon **e**_. He would have missed it entirely, if he hadn’t been reading up on the latest scientific advances, because back when he had been in uni epigenetics had been a barely understood concept and histones were considered fancy DNA-wrapping, mentioned once and then forgotten about. John took down the details deleted the e-mail, emptied the recycle bin and used a trick Sherlock had shown him to remove any last trace of it from his hard drive, before he signed up for the conference and booked a hotel room and a flight to Boston.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/24september

I’ve signed up for a medical conference in Boston. It’ll be my first international one in a while.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/15October

I’ll be leaving for Boston tomorrow. I have to say I’m a bit excited.

* * *

It wasn’t until the last day of the conference that someone brushed past John at lunch, whispering “Histone” so close to his ear that John could feel their breath. John immediately lost all interest in the buffet he had been picking at before and followed the man’s turned back outside, leaving his half full plate on a table by the door. John had been getting increasingly agitated the closer the end of the conference got, fearing that Sherlock wouldn’t turn up, that someone had gotten wind of their plans to meet and intercepted Sherlock. He’d told himself that Sherlock wouldn’t risk himself, just in order to meet with him, but he hadn’t been able to shake the dread that made it impossible to concentrate on the lectures, that had him lying awake at night, afraid to close his eyes.

John followed the man out of the hotel and into the streets of Boston, trying to look like he was just aimlessly walking around, never getting too close to his contact, but still careful not to lose him. They had been walking for about five minutes when the man ducked into a shop. John went in after him and was immediately pulled between two shelves by a hand on his sleeve. Before he could cry out, there was a hand clamped over his mouth, he was spun around and came face to face with a blonde Sherlock with thick rimmed glasses, who waited until he saw the recognition in John’s eyes before he removed his hand.

“I don’t think we’ve been followed, but you’d better put this on anyway”, Sherlock suggested; producing a hat, fake glasses and a jacket from the depths of his completely non-dramatic coat. After John was suitably disguised Sherlock handed him a little hand drawn map.

“We’re here, wander around a bit and meet me there in fifteen minutes, third floor, door to the left of the stairs”, and with that John was pushed out of the little shop, while Sherlock stayed inside, perusing the shelves.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later John opened the specified door to find Sherlock pacing in a small, dingy flat, the only furniture a desk with a laptop and a mattress serving as a bed. He spun around to the door when he heard John enter and immediately started speaking: “We don’t have much time; you need to be back at the conference after the lunch break or someone might take note of your absence. So most important things first – “

“What, I don’t hear anything from you in over tree months and I don’t even get a hello? And don’t try telling me, we don’t have time for that! We’ve got nearly an hour until I need to be back at the conference and I’m not going back to London until Sunday morning, so we still have all of tomorrow, if that isn’t enough.”

”Oh hello John, fancy meeting you here, such a coincidence”, Sherlock had put on his shamming face, making big surprised eyes at John. “Was that what you wanted?”

“I was hoping for some sincerity, but I’ll take what I can get,” John replied with a chuckle, which quickly evolved into a full blown giggle once Sherlock joined in. When he had gotten himself under control again John added: “God, it feels like I haven’t laughed in ages. Actually I don’t think I have since you left, it doesn’t really fit with the cover, does it?”

“You’re taking your role very seriously, aren’t you?” John would have been wounded by Sherlock’s surprise if he hadn’t been so proud of having surprised him in the first place.

“Yes, of course, I wouldn’t do anything to endanger your mission, now would I? Didn’t you think I’d take it seriously?”

“Of course! I knew you’d do your best, I just didn’t think you’d be so good at it... When I read those blog entries, if I hadn’t known that you’re just – In your blog you alluded to nightmares... are they...”, if he hadn’t known better, John would have said that Sherlock sounded worried, but then did he really know better? Sherlock had always shown unexpected care for his wellbeing, so was it really such a leap that he would worry, when he read that depressing excuse for a blog. Especially once he’d seen John and noticed all the little signs of too little sleep.

“Real? No, at least for the most part. I just set random alarms for the middle of the night and when they wake me up I simply... act the part. Most of the time I don’t go back to bed afterwards, so I have the eyes to match.”

“That’s quite impressive, I’d like to see that, see if your performance is accurate at all.”

“How would you know if –“, John started but then something occurred to him, “No, you didn’t!” Sherlock had the decency to look chagrined. “Of course you did, how could I ever forget that privacy is a foreign concept to you?”

“Well, the fact that I told you I could read your private blog posts without having to try first should have reminded you.”

“True.”

“Right speaking of your secret blog; anything you want to add to that?”

“I assume you were able to filter the in-case-this-is-being-hacked-posts from the this-might-actually-be-important-posts?”

“Obviously.”

“Well in that case there are only the things I didn’t observe, even though I was looking for them. Can’t really post: _‘haven’t seen anything suspicious all day’_ , can I? I’ve been paying attention to the people who were on the other conferences with me. They were all small affairs so I’m positive that I didn’t see anyone twice, so there probably isn’t anyone following me there, unless it’s a different person every time. Some of the reporters were there more than once, trying to get an interview, they might simply have been dedicated, but it’s possible they were spying on me. The media attention has completely stopped now, though, so if that was the case it isn’t any longer.”

“If you should see anyone at more than one conference, make sure you blog about it, I need to know about these things.”

“Meeting someone twice doesn’t automatically make them a tail, there is such a thing as ‘the usual crowd’ at these conferences, a lot of the people there know each other and I’m bound to meet someone again at some point, what with the frequency I’ve been attending, but I get your point, any people I’m meeting regularly are worth being looked into.”

“True, though I didn’t even need to do that to find out who is watching you when you’re in London, I just had to follow the money. That’s what I’ve been doing, ever since I faked my death, tracking their transactions, John you have no idea how boring this is! All I’ve been doing is staring at screens, trying to find a pattern, and when I find something at last, there’s no one to – there’s no audience, I don’t even have my skull, it’s hateful! Anyway, your spy: I was uncovering their method of payment, Moriarty was charging horrendous sums for his ‘consultations’, but somehow none of his clients had corresponding sums withdrawn from their bank accounts, so they weren’t paying in cash. Sure they could have withdrawn multiple smaller sums, but not all of them would have been clever enough to do that, someone would have slipped up! There were no big transactions either, so I tried adding up some of the smaller ones and comparing them with each other and realised they had all donated to various charities. No outrageous amounts, but when I added them all together they easily covered Moriarty’s fees. It’s quite a clever system, actually, no one ever questions donations and what makes it even better is that they aren’t using obscure charities that are just fronts for their transactions; they are using big ones, legitimate ones that do actual good! They simply have a few of their people in the financial department, who send that money on its convoluted way. It was almost impossible to track from there. If I hadn’t seen those patterns again and again, I wouldn’t have stood a chance! For someone investigating only one of the charities it would be completely impossible to uncover. I’m sure that even the people responsible for those charities have no idea what they are being used for, or that they are being used at all! John, it’s brilliant! I’ve never seen such a perfect system; it was definitely devised by Moriarty himself, no one else is even remotely –“, John had been happy to let Sherlock talk for a while, since it was obvious, how much he’d missed laying out his deductions for an appreciative audience, but once he started into the dangerous territory of his strange fascination with Moriarty’s methods, which didn’t seem to have diminished since the mans death, John just couldn’t bear to listen to that. So he decided to nudge Sherlock back towards the initial topic of his monologue.

“Yes Sherlock, very clever, and all that, but I thought you wanted to tell me about my spy?”

“Oh right, so I followed the money trails, trying to get an idea about the size of the web, the people involved and who they were paying for what, when it occurred to me that whoever was spying on you had to be on the payroll too. Obviously I started digging. The balance of probability said, the target account would be easily accessible from London, since the power vacuum left by Moriarty’s death would worry anyone taking a contract with them and they’d want to check that the promised money was actually arriving. Once I’d filtered any secret, foreign in-person-only accounts out I had Mycroft put the rest under surveillance. If anyone checked them, I’d be informed from where that took place. Any account that was checked from outside the UK more than once was out; accounts that were accessed from London were examined until I recognized a name and do you know why I recognized it? Because I’ve read it before, on your blog! I don’t know why I didn’t realise that in order to keep an eye on you they’d need to get close to you, actually enter your life, it would have been so much faster if I’d just –“

“Sherlock just tell me already! Who is it?”

“One Mary Morstan, working at your clinic."

“Mary? Mary is spying on me? Seriously?”

“Well, she is receiving monthly payments from Moriarty’s web, so unless she has a side business as a drug dealer, I think we can assume she’s spying on you.”

“But she seems so... so normal, compassionate; I can’t believe she’d –”

“It’s a fact, it’ll stay true regardless of your believes, so since I already took the risk of meeting you in order to tell you, I’d rather we dealt with it instead of ignoring it.” Sherlock seemed almost offended in the face of John’s disbelief.

“Alright, calm down! It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just a lot to take in. So what are we going to do about it? Couldn’t you just contact Mycroft, so he can deal with her?”

“Her cover is too good, a routine check would never blow it, and if I’m dead there is no reason for Mycroft to do any more than that. Consequently, should she be found out, the people who sent her are going to get suspicious, which would make my standing much more precarious, since they would be on their guard. Additionally, having her removed wouldn’t solve the problem at all, they would simply send someone else and I’d have to spend valuable time finding the new spy instead of concentrating on the mission.”

“So your plan is to do nothing?”

“If you can think of a better one, please inform me. Meanwhile, just be aware that she isn’t who she says she is, but don’t treat her differently. Just be careful, will you? I don’t know the particulars of her contract, so I don’t know if she’s just there to watch you, or if she’s supposed to kill you in case they find out I’m still alive. I’ve been trying to dig up her true identity and skill set, but I didn’t get past the fake name yet.”

“Fine, I’ll do my best. Contact me if you find out anything more about her, unless – you said you took a risk meeting me, how risky are we talking about here?”

“Well, to get the codeword to you I had to break into the office of the person in charge of the whole thing add you to the mailing list and change the spelling of histone in the draft of the invitation. Everyone received the misspelled version, by the way, but only you knew it wasn’t a mistake. I’ve been changing my identity quite regularly, though so even if I’d been caught they would have caught ‘Charles Mortimer’, not me. Then there was the whole business of actually meeting you, which meant getting into the conference unnoticed and evading any possible tails while leaving. So all in all not that great a risk, certainly a smaller one than not alerting you to your spy. I’ll try to alert you to any developments on that front if it is at all feasible.”

“Thank you, I always want to know if someone is planning on killing me.”

“She would only be planning on killing you, if they found out about my continued existence, and I promise you that I will do anything to stop that from happening.”

They continued talking about the finer points of the plan, exactly what John was and wasn’t allowed to do in regards to the Mary problem, how much distance could be explained away by depression and what was too much and John fit it all into the general timeline of his planned recovery.

Once they were done with that, John decided to air some of his own concerns about the future: “Sherlock, does Mycroft know?”

“That I’m alive? I’m using his resources to do this, what do you think?” Sherlock had donned his you’re-an-idiot-but-I-like-you face, which John answered with his own exasperated eye roll.

“I know that he knows about you! I was talking about myself; does he know that I know?”

“No”, Sherlock drawled, looking smug at having fooled his brother. “He is my gauge for the risk of our meetings. As long as he, with his casual surveillance on you and knowledge of my general whereabouts doesn’t pick up on them, we should be relatively safe.”

“You have to tell him, Sherlock.”

“Why would I, I’ve just explained to you why –“

“And what if something happens to you? What if you actually get yourself killed out there and no one knows to tell me, I’d wait for you to contact me, to come home and I’d never know for sure, I’d always wonder if maybe... You have to tell him.”

“He knows that Molly knows; I’ll make sure he’ll inform her, alright?”

“Fine.”

Sherlock started rummaging in a small duffel bag next to the mattress and after a moment pulled out a small packet, which he handed to John.

“Um, what’s that?”

“Fake identification, in case you ever have to leave London in a hurry and don’t have the excuse of a medical conference.”

“Thank you, do I want to know how you got your hands on this, if Mycroft still doesn’t know I’m involved?”

“Oh, I obtained it long before my ‘death’, I just never needed it. It was a simple matter of finding a forger not affiliated to Moriarty and walking into his shop. Sometimes a public image does come in rather handy, you know. He was very happy to provide me with anything I wanted in return for me not telling the police.”

“Of course, Sherlock Holmes, bane of the criminal masses. Now, is there anything else? Because my next lecture starts in fifteen minutes and if I want to take a roundabout route, I’ll have to go now.”

“No, I’m done. Take the fire escape at the end of the hallway and walk in circles for a while before you return to the conference.”

“Alright, take care.”

“You too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stole Sherlock's fake name from a chemistry textbook and the phrase with the codeword from the title of this paper: I. Marazzi et al., “Suppression of the antiviral response by an influenza histone mimic,” Nature, 483:428-33, 2012; which was cited as a source for this article:   
> http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32535/title/Flu-Fights-Dirty/   
> It's quite fascinating if you're into that kind of thing.  
> There is a medical conference under the same title in Boston this year and it sounded like an annual thing so I thought I'd put it into 2012.


	7. Going to battle

Sherlock was congratulating himself for disobeying Mycroft; really he should always disobey Mycroft as it seemed to be working really well for him. John had just left and Sherlock had been left reeling from the revelation of his utter dedication to his part of the mission. And Mycroft had lobbied to keep John in the dark! Idiot! Of course Mycroft’s logic had been sound, Mycroft’s logic always was, but for all his skill at reading people and manipulation, Sherlock’s brother had never truly understood John Watson. He had assumed that not bothering to lie was an indication of inability; that his stubbornness was a liability instead of an asset and that his inability to properly observe would make him completely useless. Mycroft had never been more wrong and Sherlock wanted to rub it in his face, but he couldn’t because Mycroft hadn’t worked it out yet, which was another huge point in favour of John, really getting anything past Mycroft was almost literally impossible and still John had done it. Not being able to gloat to anyone at all about that put a bit of a damper on it, though. It was just one of the things he hated about this self imposed exile.

Really, how had Mycroft managed to talk him into this? How had he made this sound like a good idea, like fun even? Most of the arguments Mycroft had brought forth in favour of this plan were now turning out to be severely lacking. The ability to work uninhibited by lesser minds was turning out to be a bad euphemism for loneliness and the whole ‘not having to worry about his friends safety’ was just not happening; not having them close to him and therefore observable was having the exact opposite effect; and how had Sherlock not realised these things at the time? That really had been extraordinarily stupid of him!

As a matter of fact, the only saving grace of this whole mission was having a perfectly intelligent opponent, even if said opponent was already dead. Which, as reassuring as it was, also meant that the intellectual difficulty of the task would steadily decrease as he was dismantling the parts of the network that were original Moriarty and came to the parts that had popped up since his death. Sherlock was already dreading it, but for now the puzzles were good and he had just seen John, which had put him in a better mood than he had been in, since this whole thing started.

So he booted up his laptop, checked John’s blog, which revealed nothing new and immediately scolded himself for even checking. He had checked before he had left to meet John and John had barely had enough time to get back to the conference since he left, let alone update his blog! Checking every time he started his laptop had become a habit though. Well, not just every time he started his laptop, also every time he made some progress and every time he got stuck, every time he was unpleasantly reminded that the tea he had managed to get his hands on here didn’t even remotely compare to the tea John made at home and every time he was hungry and realised he wasn’t allowed to order delivery to a safe house.

Sherlock reluctantly brought his mind back to business and opened his files on the transactions of the network. He already knew the “How” and the “Where”, but what was still missing was the “Who”. Or more accurately, who was in charge of sending certain donations on to the network and others to the people in need? If he knew the answer to that he could shut down all payments at once, by simply sending a list to Mycroft and letting law enforcement take care of it. Of course it wouldn’t be wise to do that right now, because the bigger fragments of the network had too many reserves for it to be any more than an inconvenience, moreover Sherlock would lose his best tool for monitoring their activities and if a system that had probably run smoothly for years suddenly broke down completely someone was bound to get suspicious, which would make any attempt at infiltration much a lot harder. However, knowing who was responsible for said smooth running might be extremely beneficial for delivering the last blow once the network was suitably destabilised and thus saving himself months of work, or for buying himself time, should things go pear shaped, in case someone found out about his non-death and informed the assassins set on his friends for example. If the killers were never paid for the deed, they probably, hopefully, wouldn’t complete their contracts, unless they were particularly loyal of course, which really didn’t bear thinking about.

Dismissing all worst case scenarios and contingencies from his mind, Sherlock lost himself in Moriarty’s vast labyrinth of numbers, connections and key points.

 

* * *

 

 

John had been dreading this day ever since Sherlock had told him about Mary on Friday. Today was Monday and he would have to go in for work and face the woman spying on him in about two hours. Of course it was easy for Sherlock to say: “Just act like you always do, don’t let her notice anything has changed”, when he wasn’t the one who would have to work with a spy and possible assassin on a daily basis for the foreseeable future. John had briefly considered calling in and begging off due to jetlag, but while no one would blame him, it would just postpone the problem, instead of solving it once and for all and John had never been the kind of person to back out of difficult and probably dangerous situation. So John would go to work today and act naturally, even if it killed him, which he realised it very well might if he fucked this up. “Going to work” hadn’t sounded so much like “Going to battle” since “Going to battle” had actually been in his job description.

He wondered if he should wear different shoes than he had in Boston and if he should change his jacket just in case this woman had similar powers of deduction as Sherlock, but then he scolded himself for being paranoid and stupid. Mary already knew he had been in Boston and even Sherlock wouldn’t be able to deduce his exact whereabouts without a lab analysis and what was more John hadn’t strayed further from the hotel than could be explained by a leisurely walk. Foregoing his usual work shoes and jacket would draw far more attention and not look natural at all. Which meant he was back to his problem of acting as if nothing had changed.

How did he act usually though? There was always some acting involved since Sherlock’s fake death, but after the first few horrible months, where he'd had to watch his every move, that consisted mostly of making sure he never looked quite rested and trailing off into awkward silence whenever he got close to mentioning Sherlock. Of course there was a whole host of things he wasn’t allowed to do, like joining in when his co-workers went for a drink after their shifts, or asking anyone out, but those were easy to remember and didn’t require a whole lot of acting. This however was very different. He’d have to act like he didn’t know what he knew. It would probably be easier if he could just ‘delete’ things he didn’t want to know, like Sherlock did, but in this case that wouldn’t serve either, because he couldn’t delete the knowledge completely, he’d have to keep it at the back of his mind, without anyone noticing that it was there. He’d have to know without knowing, which sounded eerily like the definition for ‘doublethink’ from Gorge Orwell’s ‘1984’. Comparing his life to a dystopia really wasn’t helping with the problem at hand though. John expected that acting normally when interacting with Mary might get easier with time, but that wasn’t really helpful either in the here and now.

If John was honest, the biggest problem wasn’t knowing that Mary was spying on him. It was the knowledge, that one wrong move in her presence could give away the game, that was causing his anxiety. Which Mary would pick up on, unless she was a truly horrible spy, and that would probably be the thing to give away the game. And there wasn’t really anything he could do about that anxiety. It might vanish completely the moment he was facing her, like it always had on the battlefield or on Sherlock’s cases, or it would linger and John would be in big trouble. Maybe he would be able to explain it away, he just had to find a legitimate reason for being nervous, but as much as he wracked his brain, he couldn’t find anything that could have happened at the conference that would explain this level of nervousness. So some future event would probably serve his purpose better; he’d never made a habit of obsessing over the past anyway. Which posed the question: What did he normally dread, when he wasn’t preoccupied with not getting himself killed, because he fucked up talking to his spy of a co-worker? The answer was so easy, it almost made him laugh. From there it was a simple matter of sending a text and waiting for an answer

* * *

“...and that’s how I got my CO to join our poker game. It was really only that once, but it was totally worth it for seeing his face when I won that first round and it dawned on him that he wouldn’t even win that bet!" When Mary started laughing and didn’t seem to notice that John’s own laugh was a bit forced, he congratulated himself on his decision to regale her with old army stories for their first conversation after John had found out about her true identity. His moment of self-congratulation was cut short though, when Mary asked: ”You seem a bit on edge, is everything alright?” Well, apparently it was time for plan B.

“Yes, I’m fine, just not looking forward to this evening.”

“What’s happening this evening? Did you piss anyone off and now they’re out to get you?”

“No, I’m just meeting my sister and believe me, that is never fun.”

“Bad relationship with your family? Wouldn’t have taken you for the type. Maybe I really am better off without any family...”

“Well, when I was shot I rather rented a truly depressing bedsit instead of moving in with her. I guess that says pretty much everything.”

They continued talking about Harry until their lunch break was over and John got back to congratulating himself for having survived that conversation. After this, meeting Harry would be a piece of cake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter on the back of my molecular biology script (which happened to be the only paper I had with me) at over 2000 metres above sea level, while on a hiking trip so blame any mistakes on oxygen deprivation and a general state of exhaustion.


	8. A Case of Identity

Sherlock was sitting in a drab little room, where the Tibetan Plateau turns into the Himalaya, listening in to the radio communications of his prey. It had taken him a while to find the right frequency, but it had been time worth spending. Despite their being in code the messages were proving to be rather enlightening.

There were no more than twelve different speakers, but their size notwithstanding, the small group was being paid millions every year by the Chinese arm of the core syndicate. Those amounts of money could only mean two things: drugs or weapons. Size of the group and location said drugs. And it appeared to be one of the more profitable venues of the network, which was why Sherlock was going to shut it down.

Of course it was all part of a global strategy, it might have been faster to take on one arm of the network after the other, but it would also make detection far more probable as the remaining parts started wondering why their affiliated cartels were collapsing all of a sudden.

Moriarty’s web really was all about outsourcing and organisation. There were a few key people, who no one ever saw or even heard the names of, who were in charge of the whole operation and who were impossible to find; those were the spiders. The rest was made up of mostly independent groups every one of which had their very specific task it was paid for; those were the threads of the web.

In order to get to the spiders, Sherlock first had to attack the web. So Sherlock would travel around removing a link here a faction there and a delivery route somewhere else, thereby steadily weakening the whole network without rousing suspicion. Obviously some of the infrastructure he destroyed would be rebuilt, but that would still cost the network time and resources they wouldn’t be able to spend on more profitable pursuits and none of the new structures would be up to Moriarty’s standards.

This group looked like its destruction might put a nice dent into their finances. Their location close to the Indian border indicated their purpose: The smuggling of rather large amounts of drugs over aforementioned border into China. The direction of the smuggling was rather obvious, since they were clearly selling their goods to the network in China, hence the large payments. The network would then distribute the drugs and sell them for a sizeable profit to the local cartels in China.

His analysis of their modus operandi brought Sherlock back to his task of taking the group of smugglers out of the picture. Doing it by force was completely out of the question since they outnumbered him at least six to one at any given moment and were always well armed, as his observation of their base had revealed. Local law enforcement was utterly useless since the lower ranks were being bribed and his alias had neither the connections nor the reputation to get him to the higher ups.

And there it was, _not being able to call Lestrade and tell him to collect the criminal I’ve found_ , another thing he hated about this mission. Maybe he should start a list, he could present it to Mycroft next time he tried to tell Sherlock what was best for him, because this undoubtedly proved that he didn’t!

Now as he couldn’t attack them at their base camp, he might be able to do something about their supply lines. The problem was that he didn’t know how those worked yet. Apparently he’d have to decode their communications anyway.

* * *

It had taken Sherlock the better part of the day to break through the first layer of their codes, it really hadn’t been all that difficult once he had realised that for some communications the base language was English and for others it was Tibetan. The language the messages had been translated from, and could be translated back into, depended on the speaker, the recipient and the nature of the message. Commands to the hired muscle were always in Tibetan, while reports from the lower ranks normally only started out that way, but were translated to English at some point of the chain of command.

This led Sherlock to believe that the head of the group wouldn’t be able to communicate with the lower ranks, due to the language barrier, because why go through the trouble of using more than one language, if there was one everyone could get by in. Maybe he would be able to use that to his advantage, he didn’t know how yet, but he would put it on his far too short list of assets anyway.

However, while Sherlock had been able to break through the first level with standard code breaking methods, the second layer was proving to be far trickier. That was because the second layer consisted of codewords that referred to people and places that likely had no connection to the actual meaning of the words. And since Sherlock was looking for their route over the border, at least the locations were rather important.

* * *

Sherlock was in his mind palace, sorting through the decoded messages, trying to gather any information from them he could on the location of their exchange point.

_Red and Thorn report to guard duty at back entrance._  

Irrelevant; all access points guarded by two people at all times; Red and Thorn two of six items of hired muscle; already knew that; rest of the hired muscle codenames Big guy, Bald, Ivan and Ram; none of them using their real names; likely nicknames acquired in their line of work.

_Delivery of Nirvana going out to Golden Snake over sunset route. East going with Ram and Bald._

Interesting but not helpful; Nirvana referring to some kind of drug, heroin most likely; Golden Snake Chinese cartel and part of the network; route irrelevant, could take them by surprise despite being outnumbered, but would only make them three people short and suspicious; need to shut them down in one stroke; East one of the middle ranks, coming along for negotiations.

_...report to guard duty..._  Irrelevant _...delivery...outgoing to..._  not helpful _...guard duty...guard duty..._ know all of those already; Bald is someone’s favourite, always gets the best watches, probably having an affair with one of the higher ups; might be able to use that to sow some discord between the hired muscle, maybe get them to revolt; probably too well trained for that, but keeping it in mind in case all else fails.

_...delivery of Nirvana...of Bliss...of Satori...of Blue...of Out...of Bright..._

Wide choice of products, hardly relevant; would make it more difficult to taint their source though; make them loose credibility; not really an option anyway; margin for error to big.

_...delivery to Eagles Nest...to Black Lotus..._ That one’s familiar. _...to Golden Snake...to Dragonclaw...to Black Lotus...to Eagles Nest...to Flamebrothers...to Dragonclaw..._

Limited number of buyers, rather even distribution of deliveries, no biggest customer; indicative of central administration; all buyers part of the network; interesting but not useful at all.

_Monk leaving for Kagyu tomorrow, prepare equipment and provisions._

Monk only one of the four middle ranks who never goes out on a delivery; obviously in charge of acquiring drugs; Kagyu apparently exchange site, but where? Provisions say more than a day’s journey; same person every time says either complicated method involving skill or exploiting human error; equipment either necessary for exchange or journey, exchange point possibly in the mountains.

Codewords irritatingly random, no information to be gained from Kagyu – wait – no – reshuffle – reorder!

_Nirvana_

_Satori_

_Monk_

_Kagyu_  

Oh! Of course. Clues fell into place like pieces of a puzzle and understanding flowed through Sherlock in a sudden rush of realization, lighting up his mind palace down to its deepest vaults and highest towers. They thought they were being clever, using shrewd allusions instead of random codes, thinking that no one would ever get close enough to them to try and decode them. Instead they had served him their point of exchange on a silver platter!

He needed a map, now!

Sherlock nearly screamed in frustration at his laptop, the necessary encryption decelerating the already sluggish internet connection in this hateful backwater dump of a village even further, making him lose valuable time, waiting for Google Maps to present him with the data he so desperately needed.

_Ridiculously slow internet connection._  

One more bullet point for the List-of-things-I-hate-about-this-mission.

There! Finally! Buddhist monastery, of the Kagyu school of Himalayan Buddhism, one and a half days journey through mountain terrain from the smugglers base camp!

Sherlock then returned to the communications, this time sorted according to when they had been made, looking for any mention of Monk’s return.

_All available personnel report for unpacking of fresh goods._  

There it was, issued eight days after the initial message. So seven days travel time. Two days for getting to the monastery, two days for getting back, taking into account possible detours for secrecy reasons, leaves three days unaccounted for, likely spent at the monastery, which would mean that at least some of the real monks must be in on the plan. Further investigation necessary, but how to investigate? Can’t just tell the monks, there’s a possibility, though unlikely, that they all know, so infiltration, need to read up on Buddhism for that.

Four days later, when Sherlock got the message that Monk was going to go out and get another charge of drugs, his cover was perfectly in place.

* * *

In the end it was all disappointingly easy. Really the hardest part was getting to the monastery, because a good part of the route could only be taken by foot and it was rather impressive what difference a few thousand metres in altitude could make in ones ability to walk for more than a few metres.

Sherlock was able to enter the monastery without any problems, his poor grasp on the Tibetan language explained away by his cover as a travelling monk, originally from Europe and any mistakes he made when observing the customs of the monastery, by having been taught in a different school of Buddhism.

Talking to the monks one by one turned out to be more difficult than Sherlock had anticipated, as for some reason they never removed their robes hoods from their heads, which made them rather difficult to tell apart. Therefore it would be far too easy to miss one.

That wasn’t standard Buddhist practice, but then the Kagyu school was characterised by a large number of sub-sects with their own slightly different customs due to their strong emphasis on guru devotion and personal transmission of teachings. Sherlock wondered if that particular custom was the reason Moriarty had chosen this monastery, since it would make it rather easy to hide someone here.

The one on one talks Sherlock had managed up until now had given him reason to believe that it wasn’t the whole monastery that was involved in the smuggling, but rather only a small group. If it even was more than one monk. It was quite reassuring to know that if he were to expose the smugglers, the rest of the monks would take his side.Now all he needed was an opportunity to observe all of the monks at once.

* * *

Sherlock’s chance came when he was asked to perform the evening ceremony the next day. By then he had determined, that none of the monks he could get a chance to talk to were working with the smugglers. Those were probably hiding out somewhere, but they would have to attend the evening ceremony, or attract attention by not being there.

When Sherlock entered the room for the ceremony through the canvas door, a quick count revealed that his deductions were correct. So far he had talked to six monks, but there were seven kneeling on the floor. One of them had to be the one working with the smugglers. The fact that it apparently was only one would make exposing him so much easier.

He now had about two seconds for each monk to observe them closely and find out which of them he didn’t know, while he performed the ritual greeting. Too bad, that he wouldn’t be able to see their faces.

When he reached the sixth monk in the row, Sherlock’s mind was working at full capacity. He hadn’t been completely sure about the identities of monk three and four and was now trying to work out a system that would allow him to verify his assumptions depending on who the others would turn out to be. At the same time he had only a few moments to concentrate on the sixth monk, who was now in front of him.

He was so occupied with everything that he almost missed it.

A barely perceptible sweet smell...

He inhaled again; he knew that scent, if only he could place it. It certainly wasn’t anything he would expect here, it belonged somewhere else, in a different life.

Ignore the incense, ignore the setting, if you didn’t know where you are, what would you think?

Crime scene!

Donovan!

Anderson’s wife must be back home, she’s using her own deodorant again – for women!

From there everything played out flawlessly. Sherlock pushed back her hood, she swore at him, the other monks were quite quick on the uptake and rather put out at finding an impostor in their midst.

It turned out that the woman had seduced one of the monks and coerced him into helping her. Their arrangement had been rather elegant actually, but then which of Moriarty’s schemes wasn’t? They would meet outside the monastery and exchange clothes for money. She would go to the monastery disguised as a monk and take his place while he went over the border into India, buy the drugs from the local contact and return to the monastery where he would get his robes back in exchange for the drugs, which she would then carry down to the smugglers base.

On his way back down Sherlock allowed himself to muse over the case. He had to admit that it had been a rather fun one, one for the blog if John had been with him. He would have called it “The Buddhist Nun” or “A Case of Identity”, or some such nonsense and Sherlock would have ridiculed him, but John would have posted it anyways and Sherlock would never admit that he had all of the entries saved in his mind palace.

If he was honest, Sherlock didn’t need a whole list of reasons to hate his mission. One bullet point, _I’m missing my blogger_ , was entirely sufficient.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was my first attempt at writing casefic. It required quite a bit of research most of which turned out to be rather useless. I'm rather proud of the result though. I hope it's alright.


	9. A Christmas Complication

“Has the BBC run a documentary about genetic diseases or am I just unlucky? Mrs. Swanson was the third person today claiming to be suffering from some rare genetic disorder and wanting to have their DNA tested, never mind that they aren’t even showing any of the symptoms!” John complained. It had gotten a lot easier to talk to Mary in the two months since Sherlock had informed John that she was spying on him. Of course he was still wary around her, but then he was wary around everyone these days. In the end she was just one more person he was lying to. “I mean raising awareness is all good and fine“, he continued, “but couldn’t they put in some sort of disclaimer, that if there is no history of that disease in their family it is highly unlikely that they have it?”

“Certainly would make our job much easier“, Mary replied with a sigh, “but we both know that’s not gonna happen.“

“It would also be nice if they could leave the ones out of it, which we can’t do anything about, even if we catch them early. Nothing is worse than a patient who is convinced that their ailment is incurable.“

“But those are so much more interesting, there’s nothing better than untimely and horrible death to keep the ratings up“, Mary whined jokingly.

“In that case, why can’t they do one on beast cancer or something else to motivate people to do their check-ups? But no, they are stuck on Chorea Huntington and the like.”

“If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, but would make our lives much easier, I want a scary prime time documentary about antibiotic resistance. People might stop demanding antibiotics against the flu and the common cold.”

It was the put on excitement, almost like a child begging for Christmas presents, that prompted John’s next response: “Oh, can I have my wish-list back? That’s what I want for Christmas!”

“So, speaking of it, are you coming to the Christmas party next week then?” Mary asked, a chuckle still colouring her voice.

John quickly wiped the smile off his face and replaced it with a gloomy expression, as if being reminded of something unpleasant, more specifically, Christmas without Sherlock. He didn’t get to be cheerful.

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

“Oh, come on! It’s going to be fun. I’ve heard that once Doctor Jenkins gets drunk enough, she can be easily persuaded to dance on the table. Apparently there is some betting going on about how early they can manage that.”

“As interesting as that sounds”, and it did sound interesting, God it did, but John wasn’t allowed. He was supposed to spend Christmas wallowing in misery, or if Greg needled him enough maybe at the Met’s Christmas party to be drunk and miserable there, but certainly not enjoying Doctor Jenkins charms alongside the woman who was spying on him, “I’m gonna have to pass. I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Why not? We’ve got to get some Christmas cheer into you somehow! And what better way to do that than some mulled wine and table dancing?” Mary was acting as if she didn’t get the hint at all, which was at odds with her normally so compassionate personality. This was the first time he’d seen her carefully constructed facade slip, which meant she was either getting complacent and careless or desperate and careless. John was guessing the second option. So, desperate for what? More insight into his life obviously and since he always was in control during working hours and never joined the others for drinks on Friday night; the Christmas party probably was a ploy to get him drunk and talking.

“That’s not going to work, sorry. I’m afraid I’d just ruin the atmosphere, but thanks for asking, anyway.” John was trying his best to radiate misery and leave-me-the-fuck-alone, but he had a feeling that Mary would only see that as a challenge.

“Oh John, is this still about ... your friend? I thought you were finally getting over that.” Mary was trying a different approach now. Her usual compassion and seemingly honest concern were back with a vengeance.

“I know Christmas is a hard time, but some distraction might do you good, and if you come to the party I’ll promise to distract you accordingly...”

And there was the flirting. It had started about two months ago, shortly after he had come back from meeting Sherlock. John had treated her as he did any other woman who tried to flirt with him at the moment. He gave her as little as he could to work with without being rude; making it very clear that he was not available. At least he hoped so. It did seem to work on the other ones, but Mary had been far more persistent. Maybe that was because, in contrast to the others, Mary’s intentions weren’t along the lines of finding herself a nice doctor husband.

They continued to talk until their lunch break was over, with Mary continuing to push for him to come to the party and John steadfastly refusing every time: He knew that if she kept it up, he’d have to give in at some point, but before that happened he’d make it clear that the only reason he was going, was because resistance had become too exhausting.

 

* * *

 

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/17december

Mary wants me to come to the clinic’s Christmas party on Friday. I really don’t think that would be a good idea, what with my family’s history with alcohol, but she is really insistent. I don’t know why she’d want me there anyway, it’s not like I’m good company at the moment. 

 

* * *

 

 

There was a girl handing out flyers in front of the clinic the next day. John thought he vaguely remembered her as being part of Sherlock’s homeless network. He wasn’t quite sure about it, since he’d never had the opportunity to study any of their faces in detail, only ever seeing them in passing. He took one of her flyers anyway and wasn’t surprised, when he discovered an additional piece of paper folded into it. He absentmindedly put both into his bag after looking around for a bin he knew wasn’t there. Anyone watching the CCTV tapes would only see him accept the flyer; glance over it briefly before putting it in his bag in lieu of a bin to dispose of it and anyone quickly going through his bag would only see the flyer as long as they didn’t look too closely. He’d keep his eye on his bag or Mary at all times regardless.

John didn’t get a chance to look at the message all day. He did however get his first real evidence that Sherlock wasn’t the only one hacking his blog, when Mary reassured him over and over that he was great company and would make a great addition to the Christmas party, only to completely change tracks and fish for information about Harry and her alcoholism when it didn’t get her anywhere. He had to give her credit for her ability to steer a conversation in her desired direction though, since the change in topics would have felt completely natural if he hadn’t been looking out for it.

 

* * *

 

 

_If you have to go to the party, don’t drink anything you didn’t see being prepared. In fact don’t drink anything at all if possible. You should act at least slightly drunk though._

_How to act drunk:_  
Don’t slur too much you don’t tend to do that and it’s far too easy to overdo, just speak with a slightly deeper voice and do some variations on speed and pitch as if you can’t quite control them anymore  
Move around a lot, as if you’re not able to sit still or can’t find a comfortable position  
Make your movements slower, no fast reactions  
Don’t overdo the balance impairments, grabbing a table from time to time to steady yourself or walking in a not completely straight line is fine, but proper swaying is not unless you’re going for blackout drunk, which I wouldn’t recommend unless your acting has dramatically improved in my absence.  
Given your current situation I’d go for depressed drunk, act increasingly subdued and monosyllabic  
Generally DON’T OVERDO IT, not seeming drunk enough is a far better option than seeming unrealistically drunk.

 

* * *

 

 

John had finally given in and agreed to go to the Christmas party, when Mary had started encouraging the rest of his colleagues to pester him about attending, the day after receiving Sherlock’s instructions. Now he was standing in the small conference room of the surgery, which was packed with people, trying to meld with the wall. Normally, he would talk to people, get a drink, have some fun, but he couldn’t, because Sherlock jumped off a roof and as a consequence, John couldn’t have a life anymore. John knew he wasn’t being fair with Sherlock, but it was Christmas and he wasn’t allowed to be happy, so he felt he’d earned his bit of vindictiveness.

“John! You came! I was starting to think you’d only agreed to get me off your back!”

“I said I’d come, didn’t I?”

“Oh, man of your word, are you?” Mary was flirting again and before he could block her attempts, John realised that this wasn’t the same situation as usual. Normally they were talking over their lunch breaks, where John could always flee citing paperwork if she got too forward. He wouldn’t have any kind of escape for a couple of hours yet and Mary did have a tendency to escalate the flirting if he didn’t respond. So blocking her completely would probably end with him having to outright reject her before the night was out, which he was loath to do, since he wasn’t keen on upsetting someone who was sent to spy on and possibly assassinate him. Besides even if she wouldn’t retaliate, there was no telling what other avenues of surveillance she would open once the most obvious one was thwarted. John resigned himself to a night of toeing the line between rejection and encouragement, hoping against hope that he wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

“No, just afraid you might hunt me down if I didn’t show up.” Was that too close to the truth? Better laugh a bit, make sure it isn’t taken as more than an offhand comment.

“Oh, I might have done just that, would you enjoy being hunted down?” Christ, Mary didn’t just escalate the flirting if she didn’t get anything from him, at this rate they would reach the point of no return long before it was acceptable for him to go home.

“I hope I’ll never have to find out. Let’s get some drinks, shall we?” John hoped his escape towards the bar didn’t look as much like fleeing as it felt, but he didn’t have very high hopes for that. He’d already decided to stick to beer for the evening, mostly because the dark bottles would make the amount of it that was still inside hard to determine, so he’d be able to fake drinking much easier than with glasses.

Mary had followed him to the bar continuing her rather aggressive flirting, while John was desperately trying to come up with a plan in case Mary decided to move beyond that, which was looking more likely by the minute.

He needed a reason to reject her, that wasn’t: I don’t date spies. I don’t date co-workers was out too, because if she had a file on him, she’d know about Sarah and that relationship hadn’t ended badly enough to make a change in mind believable. That only left him with: I’m not over my best friend’s suicide yet, which would serve for now, but had an expiration date that was quickly drawing near. The date when he was allowed to start dating again in his timeline of recovery was only a few months away. If inspiration didn’t strike soon though, he’d have to make do with it.

* * *

 

Two hours later John was utterly spent. He’d tried to get away from Mary a grand total of seven times, but she’d always stuck to him, or found him again in a matter of minutes the three times he’d tried excusing himself to the loo. The fact that he was completely out of the loop about what was going on in the lives of his other co-workers, because he’d been playing the part of the loner for the last six months and apart from Mary, no one had made the effort to draw him out. When he wasn’t actively trying to get away from her, John was struggling to keep the flirting shallow and hiding mostly full bottles of beer.

At the same time he had to keep his fake alcohol levels in mind and act accordingly. At least playing what Sherlock had called the depressed drunk was helping with keeping the flirting at bay, but that didn’t mean that Mary had taken the hint and stopped. She’d also carefully increased the accidental and deliberate touching, which John certainly wouldn’t have noticed if he had been as drunk as he was pretending to be.

* * *

 

Mary was kissing him.

Fuck.

How had this happened?

How had John let this happen?

He’d been talking to her, like he had all evening, becoming increasingly monosyllabic and appearing more depressed with every passing hour. For a while it had looked as if it was working, Mary had stopped flirting quite so aggressively and switched over to understanding concern. It had almost been nice. Would have been, in fact, if John hadn’t known that she was only fishing for information, hoping he’d slip up. Apparently he had, because Mary was kissing him and he still hadn’t pushed her away. He wasn’t really kissing back either, but if he didn’t act soon that would hardly matter.

To make matters even worse, some primal part of his brain had decided that it had been far too long and this nice warm body against him was exactly what he needed, completely ignoring the voice of reason that was screaming at him to stop, stop, STOP THIS IMMEDEATELY! So John was frozen in shock between responding and pulling away, frantically going through his options for one that might not end horribly.

He did push her away in the end. Gently, apologetically, but firmly. He’d decided on the gentlemanly, I-don’t-want-to-hurt-you approach.

“I can’t do this. I’m sorry. It’s just that... It wouldn’t be fair to you.” He’d seen the momentarily annoyed look on Mary’s face, before she’d caught herself and pulled hurt and confusion over it.

“What do you mean?” Her voice was laced with concern, inviting John to confide in her and he belatedly realised that he would have to do so, at least to some degree if he wanted his excuse to be believable.

“I’m so sorry Mary, you’re great, really, and it’s not that I don’t... It’s just, I’m in no place to... Look Mary, I told you that I lost someone and...” – deep breath – “I’m a complete mess right now and the last thing I want is to drag you down with me, I’m sorry.”

“What happened, John?”

_God, she sounds like my therapist!_ The thought struck John as almost funny, until he realised, that maybe Mycroft wasn’t the only one with access to her notes. Not that it really mattered; he was lying to her anyway. He was lying to everyone.

“I... Someone very... My... I’m sorry, I can’t... See, that’s what I meant, I can’t even tell you about this properly, there’s no way I could... I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to tell me, but if you ever want to talk about it, or anything else, I’m there, okay. Now how about I get us some drinks and we enjoy the rest of this party?”

“Actually I think I’d rather go. I’m really not in the mood for any more of this.” And with that he tried to make his escape. He really couldn’t take any more of this charade. He’d been tired to the point of complete exhaustion before this last complication and he didn’t trust himself to not slip up if he stayed any longer. Mary didn’t let him off the hook so easily though.

“Are you sure you want to be alone right now? We don’t have to stay at the party if you don’t want to, but if you want some company, I can –“

John cut her off, before she could continue and make refusing more difficult: “Don’t worry; I’ll be fine, it’s just all a bit too much right now.”

“John, I really don’t think you should –“

“Seriously Mary, I’ll be fine, I’m just going to go to bed, but thank you. Goodnight.”

He left without waiting for her to answer. If he hadn’t known that her concern was fake, he would have taken her up on her offer.

 

* * *

 

 

The next morning, half a world away, the world’s only consulting detective booted up his computer and swore loudly in three different languages. Then he started looking up medical conferences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry this took so long! I had a lab course at uni and this chapter was being particularly stubborn. I'm still not quite sure about the end product, but after almost two months I'm inclined to say that it won't be getting any better.


	10. Unsolvable is also a Solution

John wasn’t surprised when he received the invitation. He’d been all but begging Sherlock to get him out of this mess on his blog for the past week after all.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/21december

Ijust camee back from the chrismas party at the srugery and wel I shouldnt have gone. I really realy wish Id ignored eveyrones pesternig adn stayd here.

mary kissed me. Shes been fliritng wiht me for a while nwo but I’ve ben abel t just igmore it so why m I ignorign a beautifil woman, who is obivousy intreested in mee? Well theers a reason I hav a thetapist. i rejecetd hre and I feeel kidn of bad abouy it but its for teh best, relly. tehres no way i coud havd a lasitng relatoinshio right now Theres really noting eles i could hav done. Excrpt fro not going of coures but its to late for taht nw.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/22december

I really hope that this isn’t going to make things awkward between Mary and me. She’s pretty much the only person I’m talking to on a regular basis and I’m not sure if I can stand losing that piece of normality right now.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/23december

I was rather drunk by the time she kissed me; maybe I can pretend that I don’t remember anything from that night...

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/24december

I’ve taken some time off until the start of the new year. It’s a bit of a coward’s move, but I just don’t have the energy to deal with this mess right now. Maybe it’s time to get out of London for a bit again.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/25december

Merry Christmas to anyone who’s in the mood for it, I guess.

I called Mrs. Hudson today, I’ve been putting it off for a while; it just gets harder every time. She seemed alright, if a bit miffed that I haven’t been in touch lately, but I apologised and it seemed alright after that. She tried to invite me over to the flat again, but I just couldn’t face it.

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/26december

I’ve been looking up conferences again, I’d really like to get out of here soon.

 

John didn’t know if it was possible to be more obvious in his cry for help, without making the whole secret message business obsolete, by addressing Sherlock directly.

So no, John wasn’t surprised, when he was invited to a conference, which was far too fancy for the likes of him. He’d have to talk to Sherlock about what kinds of conferences were inconspicuous and which were most certainly not, because this one belonged more firmly into the second category than John was comfortable with. It was in a bloody Spa in fucking Hawaii for Gods sakes! He might be able to pass it off as an impromptu winter holiday cum conference to make it less out of character, not that he’d ever been the type of person to go on ridiculously expensive holidays, but it was the best he could come up with. Bloody Sherlock.

* * *

 

Sherlock was rapidly leading the way through the hotel, having sat down across from John at dinner and promptly started an in depth discussion about cardiac Troponin, one of the next day’s topics, a biomarker for certain heart disorders and incidentally their codeword. John had recognised him before that, though not for lack of disguise on Sherlock’s part. His hair was dyed ginger this time and slicked close to his head by a large amount of product, he was wearing a well-trimmed beard, also dyed ginger and he’d done something to his face to make himself look roughly twenty years older. He’d waited patiently for John to finish eating, before getting up to lead him to an unoccupied room. It was quite a step up from their last meeting place, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, considering that they were in a rather luxurious and hideously expensive hotel. John would have to talk to Sherlock about this, because there was no way John could afford this kind of extravagance every time they met. Right now Mary was more important though.

So as soon as they were behind closed doors, John rounded on him: “What the hell am I supposed to do now, Sherlock? Can you tell me that?”

“What, no ‘Hello’ this time? I was under the impression that you deemed that important,” Sherlock tried to get back into their usual light banter, but John wasn’t having any of that. Certainly not before his problem was solved.

“It’s not funny, Sherlock! We have an actual problem here.” Sherlock didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, though. He was still just standing there, in the middle of the room, which was three times as big as the one John had booked, looking completely aloof and maybe a little bored.

“Fine, let’s get to the point, but don’t expect a greeting next time,” Sherlock sulked, before acquiescing to John’s wishes. “You’ll have to say yes eventually, obviously, unless there’s someone else who is making advances, who you could, believably, like better.”

“What?”

Sherlock gave John his patented do-I-really-have-to spell-it-out sigh cum eyeroll and launched into clipped, rapid fire speech: “You heard me John, your timeline states, that dating is to resume after 8 to 9 months, depending on the availability of interested parties. You could possibly extend that to up to a year, though that would be quite a stretch. I know how she looks, and while not exactly what I’d categorize as ‘your type’, her appearance certainly falls within your preferred parameters of attractiveness and the way you talked about her in your blog posts, both before and after I told you, suggests that her personality, real or not, wouldn’t be a detriment to a relationship either, so unless you find someone else to enter a long-term relationship with soon, which isn’t likely since you decided to become a hermit in my absence and because we determined that the first few relationships should be short-lived due to emotional instability for maximum believability, you’ll be stuck with her, since she probably won’t let you scare her away.” During Sherlock’s little monologue John’s face had gradually morphed from disbelieving impatience to outraged disbelief.

“Sherlock, you’re not seriously suggesting that I start dating the woman who is spying on me for Moriarty’s network!”

“I don’t see what else you could do, John.” Sherlock was still the very picture of cold detachment, which had always prompted utterances of _Freak_ or _machine_ from various police officers and while he usually didn’t mind, this time it was pissing John off. This time it was his problem that was being dissected with cold efficiency. His problem that Sherlock had caused, by putting him in this godforsaken situation! And now he couldn’t even be arsed to solve it properly!

“There has to be a better solution than this! I don’t know, flee the country, fake my death... Something!”

“Fleeing the country would be highly suspicious and therefore put Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade in danger. Faking your death might have been an option, if I’d anticipated this situation and instructed you to act accordingly so you’d be able to ‘commit suicide’ believably, right now you appear to be coping with my death far too well for that to be in any way feasible, but even if you weren’t it’d be dubious if it could be done, since you dieing in any way, would certainly be investigated. As I said before you might be able to get away with finding someone else, but you’d have to keep up the acting, which would most certainly drive away most potential candidates, and after one or two tries it would get implausible for you to not try it with her too, so unless you are somehow able to convince some woman that you are the love of her life, you’d probably get stuck with Mary anyway.”

“Sherlock, there’s no way in hell I’m going out with Mary!”

“Why? It’s just some more acting and you have plenty of experience with women. This can’t be that much harder than what you’ve been doing for the past seven months.” If John wasn’t so angry and desperate for a solution, he would have laughed at Sherlock’s confusion. He didn’t think acting as Mary’s boyfriend would be more difficult than acting as her co-worker? Jesus Christ!

“You don’t get it do you? I can’t just pretend to date Mary! You just said that I won’t be able to break it off! And what then? Am I supposed to sleep with her? Tell her I love her? Marry her?” How far did Sherlock think he would go for the sake of this act?

“Yes. If you feel that it’s the appropriate point in the relationship for that. And don’t pretend that you have moral qualms about it, you’ve lied to women about the depths of your feelings before, ‘Three Continents Watson’.”

“That’s not the point, Sherlock! None of those was a spy who would get me killed if they found out about it!”

“Are you sure about that? Also Mary isn’t just a spy, she’s also an assassin, so she wouldn’t just get you killed, she’d do it herself.”

“Jesus fucking Christ! And you still want me to date her?”

“I don’t _want_ you to date her, John. I _need_ you to date her. I don’t like this solution either, but it’s the only one I have.” Sherlock had finally dropped the aloof act and there was a hint of desperation in his voice, which went further towards convincing John, than any of the carefully laid out arguments from before had. “If you can think of some way to make her stop pursuing you in the next two months you’re free to try it.”

“Alright, if I agree to this, which I’m not saying I am, how am I supposed to go about it?”

“I’ll need some more information about her exact actions and your responses so far, before I can make a prediction with any kind of accuracy. So let’s start with her appearance. What does Mary usually wear for work and what did she wear for the Christmas party? Did you, by any chance observe the shade of her lipstick? Were there any changes in her wardrobe choices since she started working with you...”

Of course John agreed to the plan in the end, because Sherlock always got his way. So John was sent home with a rather humiliating minute breakdown of how he acted in relationships, some new codewords and phrases, to be used when incorrect medical terminology wasn't going to cut it, a burner phone he was only supposed to turn on if he had to flee the country so Sherlock could use it to find him, directions to several hideouts throughout London where he could find money in case he needed it and instructions to hide his fake identification and the new phone at one of them before he invited Mary over for the first time.

Unless he had a very good idea very soon, John would be dating Mary before Easter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conference John went to actually happened. It was "The 13th Annual Multispeciality Conference on Medical Negligence and Risk Management". I stumbled upon next years version when looking for inspiration for where to send John and started looking for the one that happened in 2013. The hotel it was held in looks extremely expensive and the fact that I couldn't find their standard prices on their website leads me to believe that it's far far out of John's price range.
> 
> Also, how does one do drunk typing?


	11. One Last Hope

Molly was settling into bed with one of her favourite romance novels. It was still early, barely half past nine, but she’d already fed Toby, brushed her teeth and changed into her jim-jams, so she wouldn’t have to brave the chilly flat again, once she was under the covers. Molly was aware that her choice in reading material wasn’t a very sophisticated one today, but she didn’t care. This was comfort literature; like comfort food, but without the calories. She’d had five people in her morgue today, to identify loved ones, which was more than she normally got in a whole week, so as far as Molly was concerned, she’d earned her right to relax with some trashy, no-brain-required literature.

Molly was halfway through the second chapter, when the doorbell rang. She briefly considered ignoring it, but it didn’t stop ringing for a full ten seconds, before pausing briefly, only to start up again, even more vehemently than the first time. Whoever was at the door was obviously desperate to be let in. Molly didn’t have the heart to leave whoever it was waiting outside in the cold January night longer than necessary, so she reluctantly left her warm bed behind and made her way to the door. Who could it be at this time of night, though?

Molly wasn’t naive enough to disregard the possibility of it being someone who would harm her. Doing autopsies on victims of violent crime had quickly disillusioned her in regards to all the ways humans could and would hurt each other. Finding out who was abusing her doorbell in front of the apartment-building wasn’t actually dangerous though, with two locked doors between them.

There was also the faint possibility that this was important, like really-important, faking-autopsy-reports-important. Molly had stopped expecting Sherlock to turn up at her doorstep any minute now around two months after his swan-dive from Bart’s roof, but that didn’t mean she had ruled out the prospect of it happening altogether.

Molly ran the last few steps to the door of her flat, because the still ringing doorbell sounded urgent and if it was Sherlock, this might mean that he was in danger. She would never forgive herself if he was gunned down, because she had been too slow to buzz him in. She pulled down the receiver: “Hello?”

“Mmolly...’s ‘at you?” That was definitely not Sherlock, but almost certainly male and it sounded drunk. Molly was about to hang up and go back to bed, when the man on the other end continued talking: “I know ‘s late, bu’ can I c’me in?”

Upon further consideration, the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but because of the tinny quality of the speaker and the slurring, she couldn’t quite place it, so she asked: “Who is this?”

“Oh di’n’t I? Sorry, sorry, ‘s John, John Wa’son, ‘m sorry ‘bout this, di’n’t mean t’ –“ Shit. Molly pressed the buzzer, to let him in before he could say anything stupid and decided to wait behind the door until she could see him through the spy-hole.

She took a moment to appreciate how truly fucked up this Situation was. Molly had been subjected to a very stern lecture by Sherlock to not let her judgement be impaired under any circumstances, so she wouldn’t unwittingly give anything away and she assumed that John had gotten something similar, considering that he was probably under much closer scrutiny. Which posed the question of: What _the hell was he thinking?_ Probably not much, in his current state, stated a cynic part of her that sounded a little bit like Sherlock.

Molly opened the door once John stumbled into view at the top of the stairs and she’d made sure that it really was John, not some evil mastermind’s minion, trying to bluff his way into her flat.

“John, what are you doing here?”

“Greg’s not ‘ome, an’ ‘e said –“, John tripped over the door sill and fell against her. Before Molly could stabilise him again he whispered: “Play along, bathroom.” It didn’t sound drunk at all. Was it possible that he was just acting? If so it was a very believable performance, Molly could even smell the alcohol. Now that she was taking a closer look, Molly could see that John looked as if he had fallen a few times on his way here, there were abrasions on his palms, with dirt still clinging to them and the knees of his jeans looked as if they had seen better days. She had no idea why John wanted to be brought into her bathroom, but at least she had an excuse to do so.

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Once they were in there, John clumsily turned on the tap and let her tend to his hands, still acting drunk, but when he started speaking his low voice was clear: “How sure are you that there are no cameras or bugs in your flat?” Suddenly the reason for the bathroom was completely clear. The sound of running water was supposed to drown out their voices, in case anyone was listening in. Molly was suddenly very glad that she’d become a tiny bit paranoid since Sherlock faked his death.

“Quite sure, Sherlock checked a few weeks before he died and I haven’t let anyone in since then. I’m almost completely sure no one broke in either, because I leave some pointers behind every time I leave. You know, some dust on the floor, a hair stuck in the door, leaving the books on the shelf out of line just so, that kind of stuff.”

John dropped his drunken act completely after that and let Molly lead him to the living room, where they settled on the sofa.

“So why are you here? Have you heard from Sherlock?” Molly asked, half hope, half trepidation.

John snorted: “Yes, and it’s brought me nothing but trouble.”

“What happened? Is he alright?”

“He? He’s great. He didn’t talk much about the mission, when I met him last weekend, but the time before that he was going on and on about how brilliant it all was and how no one but Moriarty could provide this kind of challenge.” Molly wondered if something had happened between them. John wasn’t usually this bitter about Sherlock’s enthusiasms, not even when they worried him.

“You’ve actually seen him? I haven’t even heard from him once.” Molly tried to not sound disappointed, but she didn’t think she was doing a very good job of it, because John sent her his best comforting smile.

“Count yourself lucky, every single time he contacted me, it’s made my life more difficult. I’ve met with him twice now, the first time he told me that the new nurse they hired at the surgery is a spy for Moriarty’s network and the second time he informed me that I’ll probably have to start dating her, because his earlier advice was crap.” Molly knew that she really had no right to be jealous. It wasn’t like Sherlock was contacting other people for fun. He did it because there were problems to be solved. Sherlock would have contacted her if she had a spy of her own, right?

“Oh. That’s horrible. Why would you have to do that?”

“Mary, the spy, kissed me at the surgery’s Christmas party, which Sherlock advised me to go to, because she wouldn’t stop nagging.”

“What did you do?” Molly was suddenly very glad that she wasn’t in John’s spot, that she wasn’t the one who mattered. She didn’t know if she could have handled that kind of situation.

“I rejected her with the excuse of still being too messed up because of Sherlock’s death, but that won’t work for much longer and she’ll probably keep trying, so the only way to avoid a relationship with her would be to find someone else, which is something I can’t do easily without dropping the act, which I’m not allowed to do.”

“So, what will you do? It’s not like you can avoid her, since you’re working with her.”

“That’s actually why I’m here. I thought that maybe... You’re under no obligations, but I thought that maybe... you could help me.”

“What could I possibly do?” Maybe John wanted to fake his death and needed a fake autopsy, or access to the labs so he could poison the spy...

“Well, since it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to find someone else in time, I thought that... well... a fake relationship... with someone who knew... So it wouldn’t matter that I have to act like the grieving best friend...” Oh. He didn’t need her job or lab access. He needed her.

“You want to fake a relationship with me?”

“I thought it’d certainly be safer than doing it with an assassin. We wouldn’t have to actually do much, going out for dinner from time to time should be enough to keep up the illusion, and maybe I’d sleep on your couch from time to time, nothing that would make you uncomfortable.” Molly fought an absurd urge to break out into giggles, because could her life get any more bizarre than discussing the boundaries of a fake relationship with a man who smelled like he’d bathed in scotch? Well, that was Sherlock Holmes for you, making your life weird, even while being officially dead. There were more important things to discuss at the moment and Molly sobered when she realised the full ramifications of the plan.

“John I don’t know... I want to help you; really I do, but... Sherlock had all these instructions for me and... I’m not sure if I should mess with that and I... I have a boyfriend, well kind of. It was one of Sherlock’s instructions to get one... He even gave me all these pointers on what he was supposed to look like and everything –“

“He did what? That settles it. I’m going to punch the bastard next time I see him. Isn’t it enough for him to mess with my life?” For some reason John’s indignation on her behalf on top of the attitude he’d displayed towards Sherlock the whole time made her want to defend the detective, never mind that she’d been very close to punching him herself when he’d laid out his reasoning behind why her future boyfriend was supposed to look as much like him as possible.

“Don’t be so hard on him, he’s only trying to protect us. Besides, making me ask Tom out is the last thing you should punch him for. we’ve only been on a few dates, but I really like him, I even think that maybe... But if you need my help I’d break it off... I just don’t know if that would work with Sherlock’s plan, because the whole point was for me to stay as inconspicuous as possible and if you have a spy set on you, that would put me in her line of sight, wouldn’t it? I’m sorry, but I just...”

“It’s okay Molly, seriously it was a long shot anyway. And I’d never ask you to leave your boyfriend for me.”

“Did you talk about this with Sherlock? Because if he’s fine with it, I’ll do it. It’s not that big of a deal really, we haven’t been dating that long and I did promise...” To do anything in her power to help, within or without reason. Molly still wasn’t sure how Sherlock had managed to get that last concession out of her.

“You’d really do that? Wow, I can’t even tell you how much this means. I haven’t asked Sherlock, I only had the idea on the flight back, but I’ll contact him and we’ll sort this out.” John seemed to practically deflate as tension leaked out of him.

“You can communicate with him? How? He told me that he wouldn’t be able to keep a number and would be moving too fast for any messages to reach him.” Molly really needed to get rid of this stupid jealousy. She reminded herself again, that she was already part of the inner circle and it was highly probable that the only reason John could contact Sherlock and she couldn’t was that Sherlock had known that he would be the one running into problems.

“I wouldn’t actually call it communication, I just post private entries to my blog and he hacks it. It’s more like sending messages into space, I never know if he’s reading them, and I can’t actually address him directly, because if he can hack into them, Moriarty’s people can too. I know for sure that Mary is reading them. I just write about anything that happens to me and hope he picks out the ones that are important. He answers through the homeless network if he deems it important enough.”

“But if Mary is reading it, how can you ask him if it would be alright to date me?”

“Subterfuge,” John was starting to sound practically cheerful, now that he had a plan. “I’ll just write something about waking up on your couch and not remembering much of last night. He’ll get it because he’s Sherlock Holmes and anyone else won’t question it, because I actually turned up at your place apparently drunk.”

“Alright, do that. If he doesn’t say anything against it, we’ll go through with it.”

“I can’t thank you enough, for doing this.”

“Don’t mention it... So you’re going to sleep on the couch? I’ll get you a blanket.

“Thank you, again. For everything.”

 

* * *

 

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/private/12janurary

I don’t remember much about last night. Woke up on Molly’s sofa, I really hope I didn’t make too much of an arse of myself.

 

* * *

 

_Dating Molly isn’t an option. If anyone suspects her involvement, her alibi won’t hold. Did you really think I didn’t think of that plan?_

 

* * *

 

Text message; 13th of January, 11:24:  
from: John Watson  
to: Molly Hooper  
I’m so sorry to bother you again, but I think I left my wallet at your place. I’ll just pop by the morgue in my lunch break on Monday and then I’ll stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This would have been my favorite chapter to write so far, if it hadn't been for a dissapointment early on. I have a serious grievance to air about the English language: There is no equivalent for "sturmläuten", the act of putting your finger on the bell and not stopping to ring it until someone opens.


	12. Not Paranoia

John’s deadline was coming up, and he knew that if he made a single mistake, the metaphorical deadline could turn into a literal one faster than he could say _Sherlock_.

Mary had asked him out twice since she had kissed him at the Christmas party. When he’d returned to work after his failed idea with Molly, she’d initially been apologetic and stated that she hoped that things wouldn’t be awkward between them and that she’d be there if he ever wanted to talk. She’d scaled down the flirting and changed her approach over to trying to support him in his “grief”. Two weeks into it she’d asked him out for drinks on Friday evening, claiming that it didn’t have to mean anything and she’d just thought he might want to talk, when he’d rejected her with an apologetic grimace. She’d waited four weeks before trying again last Friday, this time with dinner at her place, maintaining that she just wanted to talk, when he said no again. John knew her next try would only be a matter of time.

So he’d been preparing. John had been doing everything he could think of to make sure that Mary had no chance of gaining anything beyond the questionable honour of getting closer to John’s grieving facade, once she’d moved up from “co-worker he sometimes had lunch with” to “girlfriend”. And didn’t that still sound awfully wrong in his head? Mary the spy, Mary the assassin, Mary his girlfriend. His girlfriend who would kill him without hesitation, if she ever found out about his secret. Bloody hell.

This is why he had spent the past week going over his laptop and phone with a fine tooth comb, making sure that even a thorough search wouldn’t turn up anything incriminating. Besides a few searches in his internet history about long term grief related issues, which could be easily explained away even if they had been found, there was nothing and John hadn’t expected anything else. He knew that he had been extremely careful, he was just making sure.

Now he was doing the same thing with his bedsit. It was probably time to get a proper flat again. If he was coping well enough to get a girlfriend, or let himself be gotten by said girlfriend, he was probably coping enough to care about where he was living too. He’d moved from the hotel he’d initially stayed at to his current bedsit once the hotel had become too expensive to be feasible any longer. Since back then he’d still been in the barely-coping-enough-to-stay-alive stages of the act, he’d just taken the first option available and consequently his current dwelling was even worse than where he’d stayed after being invalided. The only reason he’d put it off was that Mary would certainly have insisted on helping him move, which would have given her an opportunity to go through his things, but considering that he wouldn’t be able to keep her out forever anyway, he might as well try to find something nicer. He could only do that though, if his room was clean of any clues that could give away the game. The biggest problems were of course the fake documents and the burner phone Sherlock had provided him with. They were currently taped to the back of the lowest drawer of his wardrobe, not exactly easy to find, but not impossible either. So John was going to move them to one of Sherlock’s hideouts in about an hour.

It had taken some manoeuvring to make sure that Mary couldn’t follow him, because lately she only had shifts, when he did too. He had jumped at the opportunity to swap shifts with Doctor Lewis so he could attend his daughter’s school play, which meant that John had the morning free, while Mary was already at work. He’d debated whether or not he should call the surgery to make sure she was actually there, but ultimately decided that it would only draw attention to his actions and might prompt Mary to arrange for an alternative tail. Besides he’d have to watch out for someone following him anyway.

Sometimes John wondered if he was getting paranoid. On the way to Sherlock’s bolt-hole he had suspected four people of following him and another seven of watching. It hadn’t even been a twenty minute walk. And that was including the three times he’d doubled back to see whether his possible tails would keep following him if his route turned nonsensical. None of them had. The fourth candidate had even disappeared into a block of flats before John could add another detour to his already convoluted path. _It’s not paranoia if they are actually out to get you,_ he reminded himself. There was a confirmed spy sitting in his office, after all.

John checked one last time that no one was watching, or even looking roughly in his direction, before he quickly unlocked and pulled open the door to the hideout. It led to a maintenance room for the electricity of the building and in the back, several large boxes were stacked. Sherlock had told him that most of them contained spare parts and tools for the maintenance people and that when he had added another one of his own several years ago, nobody seemed to have noticed. It really was more of a storage space than a hideout, but then that was all John was looking for.

He’d chosen the place carefully out of all the options Sherlock had given him. It was close to the surgery as well as his current place of residence, so if he ever had to flee, there was a good chance he wouldn’t have to go far to retrieve the documents. Another point in its favour was that it was accessible at all hours. Not all of Sherlock’s boltholes were. Some depended on the opening hours of an office or shop, others were occupied at certain times, there were even a few that required the help of certain members of the homeless network to get in.

Sherlock had made John memorize all of them, what was stored where, how to get there without being spotted by CCTV and for reference, how long it would take Mycroft to find you there – the assumption was that anyone else would take at least twice that time. John was sure he hadn’t had to commit so much information to memory in a short time since med school.

John removed the pack of documents and the burner phone from beneath his coat thanking god for bloody freezing temperatures making the inconspicuous transportation of small objects much easier. He picked the lock of Sherlock’s box just like Sherlock had shown him, because there was no key; Sherlock had thrown it away without ever using it. John quickly checked if his memory as to the contents was accurate; about 500 quid, a disguise – _it would probably fit you, but not well enough to allow you to blend in, I really wouldn’t recommend it outside of an emergency_ – a first aid kit and three packs of cigarettes – _why are you making me memorise those, I’m certainly not going to need them._

Just as John was about to close the lid over the packet he’d deposited, it occurred to him that he hadn’t actually looked at the documents before he had hidden them away the first time, which was quite the oversight, now that he thought about it. He should at least know who his fake identity was, in case he ever had to use it without being able to take a look first.

The first thing he noticed when he opened the passport was the moustache. His photograph was wearing a moustache. He looked closer and yes it was almost definitely him, in fact he suspected that it was the same photo he had in his real passport, just with a moustache. _What the hell Sherlock?_ And god it looked awful. Was Sherlock expecting him to grow one? He hadn’t said anything at their last meeting, but they did have more important things to discuss then. Was this really what he would look like with a moustache? If it was, he was glad he’d never tried it out. However, despite how awful it looked, John was already plotting out how he would go about it if it turned out he did need to. He was only playing a part right now anyway; it didn’t matter if he looked stupid while doing it.

The name looked kind of familiar, but John couldn’t seem to place it. Francis Maurice Wilkins, where had he heard those names before? No, no clue, probably read them in one of Sherlock’s case files or something. Still puzzling over the name, John finally packed everything away and made his way back to his place. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone gets the reference in John's fake name without googling it, you get a gold star.


	13. Incident in New Delhi

The day had been going on for far too long for Inspector Hemal Brukesh. It had started an hour early when his five year old daughter Naima had woken up at the crack of dawn and decided that it was time for breakfast. The almighty crash from the kitchen had probably woken the whole block. He’d known that it would stretch far beyond reasonable office hours the moment his boss, DCP Ishaan Saini, had shown up in his office in the early afternoon with a case, looking like he’d seen a ghost.

The reason for his distress had quickly become clear when the name of the victim had been revealed: Arjun Saini, the DCP’s nephew had been found dead in his home by his wife and Inspector Brukesh was to lead the investigation. It wasn’t difficult to guess why. Arjun Saini was the well liked host of a morning show on DD National and his death would likely result in a medium-sized media circus and Inspector Brukesh was well versed in dealing with the press.

That is why Inspector Brukesh was still in his office half an hour after midnight, going over the details, when the Stranger, as Hemal would come to think of him, stepped through the door. He was well dressed in a long thin leather coat over his suit that flared behind him like a cape when he walked.

Hemal’s first instinct was to reach for a weapon, but he’d already stored his gun for the night, not anticipating doing anything but office-work tonight, so his best choice was the clay paperweight Naima had given him for his last birthday. Talking was probably a better option anyway, he figured.

_“Who are you and what are you doing here?”_

The Stranger only lifted an eyebrow. He looked European so Brukesh tried again in English. That elicited a response:

“My name is of no importance to you and you might call me an interested party... You’re working on the Saini case.” The Stranger sounded slightly bored, as if he had had this kind of conversation many times before.

“How do you know about that? It hasn’t been released to the press yet.” There would be a press conference the next morning, which was one of the reasons Hemal had stayed late in his office, to familiarise himself with all the details of the case and to decide what was safe for the public to know and what had to be kept under wraps as to not interfere with the investigation.

“I have my sources. Now I’ve only gotten a cursory glance at the file on my way here, so if you’d fill me in on the details, and what you’ve gathered from them so far that would be great.” The Stranger sat down in the chair on the opposite side of Brukesh’s desk, like he owned the place. It was obvious that he was used to getting his way and he didn’t even consider that Hemal could refuse to offer up the information. Well, if he thought like that he had a surprise coming at him, because Inspector Brukesh wasn’t cowed that easily.

“Why would I do that?” The Stranger’s eyes seemed to scan over him, before settling on his face with an unwavering and not just a little unsettling stare. When he answered, his voice stayed entirely dispassionate, as if he was just reading off facts and didn’t care one way or another how they would influence Hemals decision.

“Because you need help. Your daughter is going to start school soon and you want her to get a good education, but on your current salary you won’t be able to send her to the schools of your choice. Now this is the kind of case that could either make or break your career. Solve it quickly and discreetly, keep it out of the papers as much as possible and you’ll be sure to be promoted before this year is over, with a hefty bonus no doubt. Fail to solve it, or let it devolve into scandal and you’ll never be trusted with a big case again. And how are you supposed to prove your worth then? However, you haven’t been picked to solve this case. Your solving rates aren’t the highest of the division by far. If your higher ups wanted this case solved, they’d have picked Inspector Swami or Inspector Sandeep, so why were you picked instead? Simple, because someone doesn’t want this case solved, probably because they are involved. They don’t want a scandal either, though. That’s why they picked you, because if there’s one thing you are good at, it’s handling the press. Maybe they aren’t involved after all, but just know that the investigation will turn something up they’d rather stayed hidden. Who is in charge of distributing cases around here?”

“The Deputy Commissioner of Police, Ishaan Saini”, Hemal answered without thinking, stunned as he was by the accusation and the way the stranger seemed to read his worries and insecurities right off his face.

“He’s related to the victim? Interesting.”

Hemal couldn’t help himself, he had to ask: “He’s Arjun’s uncle. Do you really think Saini is involved?” He couldn’t really believe that his boss would be involved in the murder of his nephew, not with the stricken look on Saini’s face when he had put the inspector on the case.

“Not enough data. You should never theorise without all the data, which is why I am here. Now talk.” The Stranger’s face had taken on a slightly manic edge that made Hemal acutely aware that they were probably alone in the building and if the Stranger turned out to be dangerous after all, there was not much he could do to defend himself. That didn’t mean he would tell the stranger anything before he had made sure that he was trustworthy.

“How do I know if I can trust you? You broke into my office after hours, won’t even give me your name and now you demand information on a highly sensitive case. It doesn’t matter how much you could help me, but I’m not taking that risk. Either prove that I can trust you or leave!” The Stranger rolled his eyes in exasperation and produced something from his coat.

“Fine, if you insist on being dull, here’s my passport, feel free to run my name through any database you can think of. And I already told you: I have access to your files, you wouldn’t be telling me anything I can’t find out for myself, you’d just be saving me some time and the hassle of getting the right person arrested.”

The ease the Stranger had given up his name with, after the initial refusal had alarm bells ringing in the Inspector’s head. He probably wouldn’t bet on it, but there was a distinct possibility that the name was fake.

“Why are you interested in this case anyway?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I am investigating a criminal organisation and I have reason to believe that they had a hand in this. And I’m not working for anyone, in case that is your next question.” Indeed it would have been, it was uncanny how this man seemed to be able to read Hemal’s mind. He wasn’t sure if he could believe the Stranger, because who would take down a criminal organisation for fun? “Now are you going to use that,” the Stranger added, pointing at his passport, “or can I have it back? I hope I don’t have to tell you that my involvement in this case is to remain entirely confidential; it wouldn’t do for my prey to find out that I am onto them. In fact it would probably be best if you forgot my name completely.”

Brukesh quickly started the relevant searches for Michael Julian Alberts whether it was his real name or not, before deciding to verify the Stranger’s claim that he could get access to his files, while he waited for the program to run its course. If it turned out that he was in fact trustworthy, the Stranger might turn out to be rather useful in a case that didn’t seem to offer any clues.

“Prove it. If you read the file, tell me what’s in it.” He quickly opened the files on his computer, so he’d be able to fact-check the Stranger’s account.

“I never said I read the whole thing, I only glossed over it on my way here and my internet connection was atrocious, so I couldn’t see any of the pictures.”

“Well, tell me what you have read then.”

The Stranger let out a deep sigh that was almost a groan to express his distaste at having to prove himself.

“Arjun Saini was found dead in his flat by his wife at 15:23 this afternoon. He was shot from behind in the kitchen, the weapon hasn’t been found and the ballistics report is still pending. There was no sign of forced entry, suggesting that he knew his killer. Time of death was estimated as between 14:57 and 15:10, that’s unusually accurate. The determination of PMI via analysis of hypoxanthine and potassium in vitreous humour has been estimated to be accurate within a confidence interval of at best ± 25 minutes during the first 6 hours after death, though there are studies that suggest that in practice ± 1 hour is the best it can do, which is still better than measuring the core temperature of the brain where the accuracy is at about ±1.5 hours, so an interval of not even 15 minutes seems to be a bit dodgy. I’ll need to see the forensics report to determine where they –“, his rapid fire analysis was interrupted by the “ping” of the computer finishing its search. Hemal wasn’t surprised when he switched tabs to find that nothing incriminating had turned up. The stranger seemed to read the results off his face, because he didn’t miss a beat, “That is if you’re finally convinced I’m not going to ruin your career.” The stranger sounded vaguely annoyed now, but it had a resigned air to it.

“Just because you’re not a wanted criminal, doesn’t mean you’re trustworthy and the murderer would know most of the things you just told me. I want to hear more.” Not to mention that Brukesh really wasn’t convinced that the Stranger had given up his real name.

“Fine, if you insist. If I didn’t need someone to actually arrest the murderer, this would be such a waste of time; I could get the files faster myself. You took the wife’s statement and determined that she has a rather watertight alibi, since she was caught on CCTV at the time of death. According to his wife he didn’t have any enemies, a good relationship with his family and everybody liked him. None of the neighbours heard anything which suggests that the murderer used a silencer. No one saw anything out of the ordinary either. You haven’t investigated his work colleagues yet, probably because you want to get the official statement on his death out before you talk to anyone from the media. I’m afraid that’s all I have right now, since I only had about five minutes to read the file, so if this doesn’t convince you I guess you’ll have to do without my help.” He seemed completely unconcerned at the possibility, as if there was no way the inspector wouldn’t let him in and if Hemal was honest with himself, the Stranger was right, if this really was the work of a criminal organisation there was no way he could reject the help of someone who seemed to know what was going on. However, it wouldn’t hurt to test the Stranger’s ability to be helpful, before letting him in all the way.

“Alright, you wanted the forensics report, right? Well, here you go, tell me something I don’t know already and I’ll consider letting you in properly.”

“Easy”, the stranger smirked, before getting absorbed in the file.

He resurfaced a few minutes later with a thoughtful frown on his face.

“Forensics puts time of death between 13:50 and 15:10, why does the main report say differently?”

“It was narrowed down further by the last internet activity from his phone at 15:23.” They had been lucky in this regard. While it was standard procedure to check the last activity from the victim’s phone, being able to narrow it down that much was rare.

“Interesting, what was it?”

“The internet activity?” Hemal quickly consulted the tech-report. “He posted a picture on social media, apparently he was one of those people who take pictures of their food before they eat it.”

“Did he actually get to eat it or was he killed before he got the chance?”

“No the ice cream was still sitting on the counter when we got there.”

The change that came over the Stranger at those words was immense. He went from gathering information, enquiring about facts and turning them over in his head to a bloodhound on a scent, completely focused on a clue Hemal had unwittingly given him.

“Ice cream? Why didn’t you say that right away? I need to see the picture and any pictures you lot took there, please tell me you didn’t neglect to photograph the ice cream!”

“Alright, alright I’m already looking! Why is the ice cream relevant?”

“The pictures, please.”

There was indeed a picture of the rather melted glass of ice cream among the numerous photos taken of the crime scene, which Hemal showed the stranger along with the heavily filtered one the victim had taken himself.

“When was this taken?”

“The timestamp says 15:26.”

“The flat was air conditioned. What was the set temperature? Wait don’t bother it’s right here in the forensics report.” Hemal waited for the stranger to elaborate, but he seemed lost in thought, muttering to himself: “No, that’s not right... Far too short...but maybe it’s different here...” Suddenly the stranger jumped out of his chair as if it had bitten him, took one last close look at the pictures on the screen and made to get out of the office, but he seemed to catch himself at the last moment and called back to the inspector: “I need to test out a theory, I’ll contact you when I have results.” With that he stormed out, coat flaring after him, leaving behind the wide eyed, open mouthed inspector.

* * *

 

It was late on the second day of the investigation and Inspector Brukesh was once again sitting in his office long after most of his colleagues had called it a day and gone home. He had seen neither hide nor hair of the Stranger since he had stormed out the previous night. Hemal wondered if he would see him again. He sincerely hoped so, as unsettling as the unexpected visitor had been, he had seemed like he knew what he was talking about and it was even clearer now than it had been last night, that if the inspector wanted to solve this case, he could use any help he could get. After he had exhausted every other line of investigation he could think of Hemal had spent about an hour looking at the pictures of ice cream, trying to figure out what the Stranger had seen in them, but it looked like perfectly ordinary ice cream, nothing unusual about it. If the clue was in fact in the ice cream, he couldn’t see it. The inspector decided to go through all the evidence one last time to see if he had missed something and then he would follow his colleagues’ example and go home. Maybe his wife would still be awake today.

Hemal was just finishing up, reading through the last interview with one of the victim’s co-workers when the Stranger once again breezed into his office and it was a good thing he did, since the inspector was well and truly stuck. The Stranger deposited himself in the chair in front of Hemal’s desk and immediately launched into speech: “Your timeline is wrong! I’ve determined the brand of ice cream and at 20°C the amount the victim prepared takes between 42 and 47 minutes, depending on other variables I haven’t been able to determine with enough accuracy, to melt down completely, which is how you found it when you arrived at the scene, however there were only 29 minutes between the post and your arrival. Therefore the picture was taken at least 13 minutes prior to posting, probably more, judging from the sunken chocolate flakes. So why would he make himself ice cream, take a photo of it, not eat it and then post the picture later? He wouldn’t. He made it, took the photo and then was interrupted, probably by a bullet in his back. But if he didn’t post the photo, who did? Obviously the murderer, making it seem like the victim was alive longer than he was. Why, would they do that? Simple, to get alibi. Of course they’d need an opportunity to sneak the phone back in before the body was found, but after the latest possible time of death, as determined by forensics. I’ve gone through all the alibis and the only one who had the opportunity and a motive is Avani Saini, the victims wife. He was cheating on her, it’s all in the data from his phone. She’s probably also the only one who knew his routines well enough to pull this off. To confirm my suspicion I’ll need to see the CCTV footage of her from when the picture was posted, so if you could...”

“Sure,” Brukesh didn’t hesitate to pull up the requested video, after all, if the Stranger turned out to be right, that was his case solved, “here you go.”

 

_12 /03 /13 14:51_

_The view of the camera shows the door and part of the interior of a little cafe. At first there are no people in the frame, but after a few seconds a young woman walks in._

“That’s her”

“Obviously.”

_The woman’s eyes make a quick sweep of the room, before –_

“Pause the video.”

“Now go back, frame by frame”

“There. She’s looking directly at the camera. She was trying to conceal it in a general sweep of the place, but there was a barely perceptible hesitation before she moved on. She’s aware of being filmed, in fact it’s crucial to her plan. Continue.”

_The woman’s eyes make a quick sweep of the room with a barely perceptible hesitation in the direction of the camera, before she walks further into the room, settling down on a small table on the outer edge of the camera’s frame. She quickly looks through the menu and puts it aside._

“She barely glanced at the menu, she’s been there before, probably multiple times, so she would have known about the camera already.”

_When the waiter approaches her, the woman orders, turning to her handbag once he’s gone. She takes out her phone, seemingly killing time until her order arrives._

“The phone’s the same model as her husband’s, but the case is definitely a feminine design. When she took it out she was careful not to touch anything but the case. She’s also using a stylus to type, useful if one doesn’t want to leave prints. She probably switched cases at the scene, so she can hold the phone without gloves. I’ve seen everything I need to. Arrest her, text me once she’s in custody, I’ll need to talk to her. ”

And with that the Stranger was gone once again, leaving behind only a slip of paper with a phone number.

* * *

 

In the end Inspector Brukesh didn’t arrest Avani Saini. As plausible as the Stranger’s theory was, there just wasn’t any solid evidence that would warrant an arrest. Instead he pulled her in for questioning and texted the Stranger, hoping that the clever man would be able to get a confession or at least some evidence that would hold up in court.

The Stranger must have been awaiting Brukesh’s text, because when he opened the door to the interrogation room barely ten minutes after sending the text the man was already inside, sitting in the corner, his dramatic coat thrown carelessly over the back of his chair. How he had gotten there in the middle of the day without anyone throwing him out, was a complete mystery to Hemal, though since the Stranger had done nothing but seemingly impossible things so far, it wasn’t as much of a surprise as it would have been three days ago.

He didn’t know what the man’s plan was so he led the victim’s wife into the room without batting an eye, acting as if he had expected the Stranger to be there, before he could say anything though, his phone chimed with a text from a blocked number.

_Play along. You’re the bad cop._

So Brukesh put the woman in her chair, coldly informed her of her rights and proceeded to tell her exactly how screwed she was if she didn’t confess, because her alibi was useless and this very second forensics were going through all her stuff with a fine tooth comb and how sure was she really that they wouldn’t find anything?

Normally he’d go a more diplomatic path when he interrogated someone, he preferred to charm the suspects into their confessions, but he was perfectly capable of scaring them if the situation warranted it. And if the Stranger, who had practically solved his case, suggested that he do so, Hemal wasn’t going to argue. However, it didn’t seem to be working, Avani Saini seemed to know exactly what kind of evidence was required to put her into jail and was adamant that they wouldn’t find it. Just before he was running out of things to say he got another text.

_Pretend this is important and you have to leave, come back in about fifteen minutes._

So he left, enquired about the progress of the forensics team and when that didn’t yield any new information he returned to his office to spend the rest of the time staring at his computer, wondering how the Stranger was faring.

When Brukesh came back into the interrogation room after the allotted time had passed, the woman was crying and the Stranger was already donning his coat and striding out of the room calling: “The confession is between 11:14 and 11:19 on the tape, delete the rest. And you might want to keep an eye on your boss, I believe he’s being blackmailed. You’re welcome!” behind him.

* * *

 

_14 /03 /13 11:06_

_The footage shows the view from the upper right corner of the back wall of the interrogation room. It has a clear shot of Avani Saini’s face, who is sitting at a table with Inspector Brukesh across from her. She looks much calmer than would be expected of someone being interrogated for murder._

_“Forensics isn’t going to find anything, because I didn’t do it! I loved my husband.”_

_The Inspector sighs and is about to go on talking, when the chime of a phone interrupts him. He looks down and gets up._

_“Forensics found something, they want me at the scene. I give you until I get back to think over your statement.”_

_As soon as the door closes behind the Inspector a cool, detached voice says: “Well, time to get to the real questions,” and the woman looks over to a place right below the camera, startled._

_“You forgot I was here, didn’t you? You noticed me when you walked in and wondered who I am and why I am here, but Inspector Brukesh distracted you accordingly, so you didn’t give me much thought. You should have, you know. I know more about why you’re here than you do. I know more about why you killed your husband than you do.”_

_“I’ve already told the Inspector that I didn’t kill Arjun, I loved him.”_

_“Could you please be less tedious? Right now I don’t wish you any harm, you’re just a pawn to them and a puzzle piece to me, but if you continue being dull I might change my mind about that.”_

_“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”_

_“I know. You don’t know anything, I on the other hand do. And what I know tells me that I can use the information you unknowingly possess.”_

_“What? I’m here because the inspector is an idiot, who thinks my alibi isn’t good enough and therefore I have to be the murderer. I don’t know what you think I know, but I don’t.”_

_“I believe you. You really have no idea why you killed your husband, oh you think you know, you think you killed him because he was a cheating bastard who was going to leave you, but that’s not true. Tell me, who informed you about the cheating?”_

_“How dare you? Arjun loved me, he’d never –“_

_“Oh quit shamming, it’s not working on me, because I already know everything. The only thing I need from you is a confession and a name.”_

_“You’re wrong! There’s nothing I could tell you.”_

_“Fine, if you’re not going to tell me, I’m going to tell you. About a month ago someone approached you and told you they’d seen your husband with another woman. Initially you didn’t believe them, but you did wonder and when they produced evidence, a picture probably, you finally broke and looked into his phone and what you found there backed their claim. The person who told you, you trust them, because when they told you not to confront your husband, you followed their advice. They continued to reinforce the message that your husband was a complete bastard who deserved to die a horrible death, an absolute scoundrel who was capable of anything and never really loved you, until you believed it. So when the texts on his phone started to demand that he leave you, you believed he would and you got scared. You don’t have your own income and your husband had connections, if he wanted to, he could ruin you, take away the lifestyle you’ve started to take for granted. Of course your friend encouraged you in your fears until you didn’t regard the worst-case-scenario as a remote possibility anymore, but as the most likely outcome. And then, when you were at your weakest, they made a suggestion, something they had said before in jest, but this time they were serious, they thought your only choice was to kill him and they knew exactly how it could be done. You didn’t see another way out, so you let them talk you into it and before you could change your mind, they had arranged everything, the time, the place, the alibi, the weapon, the disposal of the evidence...”_

_“How can you –“_

_“Know? I told you, I know everything. So are you ready to give me a name yet, or do you want me to go on?”_

_The woman is staring defiantly ahead, refusing to look over to where the owner of the voice is sitting._

_“Do you know why they needed you husband dead? It had nothing to do with him, he was just related to the wrong person. His uncle is with the police and he was going through some old cases recently, mostly cold ones. And if he isn’t a complete idiot he probably saw the same thing I did when I looked through them. A pattern. A pattern with very uncomfortable implications. If he went public with it, there would be quite the scandal, heads would roll and a rather big criminal organisation would receive a sizable dent. Naturally it wasn’t long before he was warned off, but he persisted, got the attention of some higher ups, but they didn’t take his word for gospel yet, so he was ordered to gather more evidence, build a solid case, if he fails to do so, the matter will come to nothing. So they need him to back off, badly. They can’t kill him, as that would certainly draw even more attention to his case, so they’re threatening his relatives. You know, someone got paid a hefty sum for Arjun Saini’s death, and it wasn’t you, the person who actually killed him. Assassination by jealous wife, it’s an almost perfect crime, because even if you’re captured, you couldn’t really betray anyone, since you actually believe that it was your own idea. But being used as someone’s gun isn’t even the most tragic thing... At least not for you. While I was waiting for the Inspector to bring you in, I was having a look through your husband’s phone and you know what? You were right earlier, Arjun didn’t cheat on you, he wasn’t planning on leaving you, all those texts you found on his phone, they were completely fake, planted there to make you jealous and insecure enough so they could influence you.”_

_“I don’t believe you! How dare you, say these things?”_

_There are now tears in her eyes, but she refuses to let them fall._

_“Whether, or not you admit it doesn’t change anything. It most certainly doesn’t change the fact that you killed your husband, who never did anything but love you, and if you’re honest with yourself, you know I’m right, you know they played you and you were putty in their hands, because deep down you never believed that you deserve to be loved.”_

_The accused woman has finally lost her battle against her tears and is openly crying._

_“Avani, your husband didn’t deserve to die, but there’s nothing you can do about that now. What you can do is help me bring those to justice who did this. His death isn’t your fault, you were only the tool they used to reach their goal and believe me when I say that if you had been stronger and resisted them, they would only have switched tools.”_

_“Alright, you’ll get your name and your confession, but you have to promise me. Promise me that anyone who had a hand in this will pay.”_

_“I promise.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did some livingroom experimentation for this chapter and watched ice cream melt, because I had no idea how long that takes. The answer made coming up with an acceptable timeline a lot harder.


	14. Another Move in the Game

In the end it was precisely four weeks – John was keeping track – after her last failed attempt that Mary asked John whether he was planning anything for his birthday. There had been four weeks between the last two tries too. Mary had probably scheduled them carefully so they would be frequent enough to be perceived as a steady message of “I’m still here, I’m not going anywhere”, but not so frequent that they would become a nuisance. She was obviously willing to wait for however long it would take him to cave in. Well, she wouldn’t have to wait much longer, because John’s deadline had finally arrived. It was a little over nine months since Sherlock’s ‘death’, high time for John to ‘move on’. However, he was planning to take things slow with Mary, in the hope that he wouldn’t have to progress the relationship too far, before Sherlock finished his mission and things could go back to normal. The trust issues his therapist had diagnosed him with, combined with his still lingering ‘grief’ over Sherlock’s supposed death would provide him with a handy excuse.

So John told her that, no he didn’t have anything planned and Mary suggested dinner. Not a date, as she was quick to reassure him, just some people from the clinic and anyone else he might want to invite. John was glad that they wouldn’t be alone the first time they went out together and happily agreed.

He was wary to invite Greg and Mrs Hudson though, since his first instinct was to keep them as far away from his spy as possible, they were the other two intended targets after all. It wouldn’t serve to exclude them though; it might attract more attention than their presence ever could. John would just have to keep Mary’s attention on himself for the evening. There was another reason he wasn’t keen on inviting them. Talking to them at all was mentally exhausting, which was why he hadn’t called Mrs. Hudson since Christmas and didn’t talk to Greg unless his texts became really insistent or he turned up on John’s doorstep. He despised lying to them and hated himself for doing it anyway, whenever he talked to them.

John didn’t really mind lying to strangers and acquaintances. To them Sherlock’s Fall was a media sensation and nothing more. His eventual resurrection would just be another media sensation, one with even better entertainment value than his death. He didn’t even have a problem with lying to most of his friends. They saw Sherlock’s death as the reason why John wasn’t coming to the pub so much anymore. Maybe some of them had worried about him for a while, but ultimately they didn’t suffer because of it.

The few, who counted Sherlock as their friend, were a different story. They, unlike him, had actually lost someone that day. They had actually grieved for Sherlock, still did. Greg was still blaming himself, despite the fact that, even if it had been real, he couldn’t have done anything to stop it, except for losing his job and still not making a difference. They didn’t even know why Sherlock had jumped, though John wasn’t sure if it would make it better or worse for them to know. Not that it mattered, since there was no way to tell them, without confessing the whole story, because how would he know? As for the whole story, John had debated over telling them a good long time. Especially in the beginning he had almost decided to tell them the truth, regardless of Sherlock’s disapproval, several times, but at that point his act hadn’t allowed him to contact anyone, so he had put it off. Later, when he became more aware of all the restrictions his knowledge was putting on his life, he started to think that maybe it would be easier for them not to know. By then they had dealt with the worst of it, they’d moved on with their lives. They probably wouldn’t believe him anyway, they’d think he’d finally gone round the bend and it wasn’t like he had any evidence of Sherlock’s continued survival, in fact he had made very sure he didn’t. 

Still, every time he talked to one of them, he felt like he should tell them; that he owed them the truth. In the end, prudence always won out, after all, as his dad used to say, _three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead_ and there were already at least four very alive people in the know. That didn’t make staying silent any easier, just necessary.

* * *

 

The dinner went about as well as could be expected.

Talking to his colleagues and the friends he had invited was awkward, because he’d barely talked to any of them in the last nine months and they were either still walking on eggshells around him or resentful about the radio-silence.

Greg tried again to apologise for the role he’d had in Sherlock’s arrest, like he had done almost every time they had seen each other since, which was another reason John was avoiding him whenever he could. He just couldn’t stand seeing Greg blaming himself for something that hadn’t even happened, and wouldn’t have been his fault, even if it had. Once John had, once again, reassured him that the only thing he could have accomplished by refusing, was loosing his job, Greg told him about how he was trying to clear Sherlock’s name in his off-time, but running into red tape at every corner. Not that he had much off-time anyway. He’d come close enough to being fired, even without standing up for Sherlock that day and still wasn’t entirely trusted by his superiors. His dogged insistence that Sherlock was innocent wasn’t helping his case either, so right now he was the dogsbody of his division, working all the cases no one else wanted, because the only thing they lead to were mounds of paperwork. John wanted to tell Greg that he didn’t need to risk damaging his career even further for Sherlock’s sake. He wanted to tell him that it was completely pointless, because Sherlock’s name would be cleared eventually anyway, regardless of Greg’s efforts, Mycroft would see to that.

Mrs Hudson asked him if he really didn’t want to move back to Baker Street, oh of course she understood that it was hard for him, what with all the memories connected to the place, but surely he’d get used to it and she never saw him anymore since he’d moved out it was almost as if he’d – died too. John hated himself for not being able to say yes, but it was out of the question, especially with the plans he had with Mary. There was no way he could put Mrs Hudson into the line of fire, if she got hurt because of his carelessness, he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. He wasn’t sure whether he could forgive himself for abandoning her either though.

All in all it could have been worse, but John was glad when people started leaving. He wasn’t used to big groups anymore, having spent the last nine months avoiding everyone as much as possible, and he was exhausted. However the day wasn’t over yet and the most difficult part of the evening was still to come.

Mary had been right beside him the whole evening, being her pleasant self and setting John’s teeth on edge, anxiety building in the pit of his stomach. He’d been expecting her to make a move ever since she’d arrived, but so far she hadn’t done anything beyond the usual low level flirting.

The waiting was the worst, really. It always was, no matter if he was in the theatre, waiting for the first patient to be brought in, on a stakeout, waiting for the suspect to show, or on his own birthday party waiting for his spy, assassin and future girlfriend to make the first move. Once the action started he would be completely calm, but the waiting was the worst. Therefore he was almost relieved, when Mary asked if he wanted to come over to her place for a drink and he could finally _do_ something. Even if it was just to nod and follow her home, it beat waiting any day.

* * *

 

When they got to Mary’s flat they settled down on her sofa and she poured them some wine and made small talk. John watched her every move and switched their glasses when she went to the loo.

After a while of meaningless chatter and light flirtation, which John participated in for the first time since that ill fated Christmas party, Mary turned a little more serious: “Dinner went really well, don’t you think?”

“Surprisingly yes” John agreed, “it was nice seeing everyone again.” He wasn’t even lying, it had been nice, frustrating and emotionally exhausting, but nevertheless nice.

“I told you, you’d enjoy it.” Enjoy was probably too strong a word, but it wouldn’t do to discourage her now. He’d committed to this, he’d bloody well see it through.

“That you did, thank you for talking me into it.” Let her believe his acquiescence was due to her ability for manipulation, instead of a well planned move in a game in which both of them were pawns. To be honest, if he hadn’t known what she was, he’d have caved in much sooner than he had.

“You just need to get out more, maybe you won’t be such a grump all the time then.” Alright, time to ‘open up’ then. Explain his grumpiness, be vulnerable. He’d prepared the words beforehand, but decided against practicing in front of the mirror. He’d never been good at talking about the important stuff, so a certain amount of awkwardness would only make the performance more believable.

“You’re right,” he sighed. “I know that most of the time I’ll enjoy myself, once I’m among other people, it just always seems like such an effort to get to that point, like there isn’t enough energy in me to ever hope to reach it.” That should be enough ‘opening up’ for today. It was a good thing that he wasn’t normally one to talk about his feelings. It would be easy to make Mary work for every single bit of information, while making her feel like she was making steady progress. It should stop her from getting frustrated with her current course of action and digging deeper, thereby preventing her from finding out about Sherlock.

“Hmm, sounds like you could use someone to drag you out from time to time, you know, get you over that initial apprehension.” Well, she was letting him off the hook easily. John had expected her to persist, trying to make him share more. Instead she had given him the perfect opening to change tracks over to flirting again.

“Are you volunteering?” It actually was much easier to talk to Mary, now that John was allowed to flirt back, because really, flirting was the easiest part of any given relationship. It had always come naturally to him and he was glad he could fall back on that now.

“If I was, would you go out with me?” Good, she was going along with it, not that he hadn’t expected her to, what with the way she had been throwing herself at him for months now, but still, it was a relief to be able to stay in familiar territory.

“Would I have a choice? Or were you just going to drag me out the door, whether I liked it or not?” This was the part of the game he was good at, always had been. John had never had any difficulties getting into relationships, it was when he was trying to keep them that all the trouble started. Well at least he wouldn’t have to worry about that in this case. Mary wouldn’t let go of him, unless Moriarty’s people stopped paying her.

“Oh trust me, you’ll like it.”

“You sound awfully sure of yourself.” John was starting to enjoy himself. It was surprisingly easy to push the awareness of Mary’s true identity back and let the familiar back-and-forth suck him in. Maybe this wouldn’t be overly hard after all.

“You don’t believe me? Are you calling me a liar?”

“Well, not quite, but I think I’ll have to experience that for myself, to fully believe it.”

“Oh, I think, I might be able to arrange that.” Mary had been inching closer to him the whole time they were talking and John quickly considered how far he wanted this to go tonight and if maybe he should subtly stop her, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. He’d have to hold up the deception long enough that they’d land in bed sooner or later anyway, he might as well get it over with now. His body certainly was on board with that plan.

“I’m looking forward to it.” The disturbing thing was that he was telling the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, the last part of this chapter took forever. Uni has been eating me alive, which prompted my brain to throw around with science metaphors and I repeatedly had to remind myself that I'm not writing Sherlock, but John and Mary. The fact that writing any kind of flirting is at least three standard deviations outside of my comfort zone didn't help either (see what I mean with the science-brain?). At least I feel like I'm finally getting a proper hold on Mary's character.
> 
> I decided to put John's birthday on the 31st of March, since that seems to be the only more or less supported claim and it fit well with my timeline.


	15. Conversations with Undercover Agents and Consulting Criminals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS: Allusions to a past abusive relationship, in that context some pretty vile things are said
> 
> Also, heed the rating change. I'm not sure if this chapter really needs it, but I thought better safe than sorry and it would have happened sooner rather than later anyway...
> 
> I believe this chapter works best if you have http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/ open in another tab and read the entries corresponding to the dates here between these scenes.

2\. 4. 2013; London, UK

“You told me last week that you’d be having dinner with your friends for your birthday. How did that go?”

“Quite well... I think...”

“You think?”

“There were... developments...”

“...”

“Mary invited me over to her place again... and I said yes.”

“So you believe you’re ready for a relationship?”

“You don’t think so.”

“I didn’t say that. When you told me before that she was making advances, you said that you rejected her, because you didn’t feel like you were ready for a relationship. What changed?”

“I...I don’t know, I just... feel better, I guess. The first time, when she kissed me at that Christmas party... well... Christmas wasn’t a good time in general and... I just... didn’t think I could... deal with another thing. But she was persistent, she’s... never stopped asking me out, and I’ve been looking for a new flat, going to more international conferences and I don’t know... I thought... well, I’ve warned her... and she’s still here, so...”

“So you decided to give it a go?”

“I guess, yeah... I mean what’s the worst that could happen?”

“What are your expectations for this relationship?”

“I... Honestly I don’t know. I mean nothing’s really happened yet... We just talked, I told her that I want to take things slow and she told me to take my time... Realistically I know, I shouldn’t have too high expectations, I’m... not at my best right now, but I’m better now than when I first met her, and... apparently even then... she must have seen something in me, so I don’t know...”

 

* * *

 

8\. 4. 2013; Hamburg, Germany (Transcript translated from original German)

“You do realise that she’s going to kill you, right?”

“What are you on about?”

“Your boss Honey, she’s gonna have you killed in about two months, tops.”

“What are you talking about? She trusts me!”

“Really? You think so? Yeah sure, right now she tells you everything about the deal with Schröder’s people, because you’re such a good girl, and she lets you do her dirty, sorry important, work, but once she closes it? You do know what happened to your predecessor, right?”

“He was a traitor, tried to sell her out to the cops. I’m not that stupid.”

“Think about it Honey, do you know anything about her business that isn’t linked to the deal you’re working on right now? No? If she really was planning on keeping you as her PA like she told you, wouldn’t she introduce you to the bigger picture?”

“Oh please, you have no idea what she is and isn’t telling me. You’re just scheming to make me betray her and get into her good graces. I already told you, I’m not that stupid.”

“You’re right, I have no idea what exactly you are talking about when you’re in there. But I’m still right, aren’t I? You know, I’ve been watching this business for a while now and the modus operandi is always the same. New minion – new deal, business avenue, takeover, your pick – deal clinched, new line working fine, takeover done with – minion disappears – new minion, and so on. That way no one ever knows any more about her than they absolutely have to in order to be qualified for her dirty work. You hadn’t been in her business for more than a year, when she made you her PA. How do you think you got that job instead of someone who’s been involved much longer? Honey, are you really vain enough to believe that you have been chosen because of your outstanding qualification? Or is it maybe more likely that you got the job because no one else wanted it?”

“Give me one reason why I should believe you.”

“I really don’t care if you believe me, I was just trying to warn you. If you don’t want my advice, fine but don’t be surprised when she sends her killers after you. Make up your own mind and once you get to the inevitable conclusion, you know where to find me.”

 

* * *

 

9\. 4. 2013; London, UK

“How are things going with Mary?”

“Fine, they’re going fine, great really...”

“That’s good, have you thought about your expectations for this relationship?”

“Mary... she’s wonderful, I really don’t know what she’d want with someone like me, but... I want to make things work with her. I just... I don’t know if I can.”

“What are you worrying about?”

“She’d be out of my league even under normal circumstances and right now... I have all this baggage and...

“You’ve been working with Mary for about nine months now, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d say that you’ve become friends?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“So it’s safe to say that she knows about your baggage, as you call it?”

“Probably.”

“And she was the one who pursued you? And continued even after you’d rejected her?”

“Yes”

“If we take all that into account, do you think that she thinks that she is out of your league?”

“Well, no but...”

“Or that she doesn’t have an idea of what she can expect from you?”

“No, but...”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know... I’ve never been especially good at keeping relationships, granted some of that was Sherlock’s – wasn’t my fault, but...”

“I’m not saying that you won’t have to work on your issues, but from what you’ve told me, I don’t think Mary is liable to run for the hills at the first sign of trouble.”

“About that, I mean working on my issues... Mary had a suggestion the other day... She asked if I ever planned to reactivate my blog, the public one.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I didn’t like the idea at first, but... it’s kind of grown on me since... I’m not sure I’ll be able to write something I’d be willing to post, but... I think I should give it a try at least.”

“I think it’s a great idea. It will be good for you to focus on the good parts when you think about Sherlock.”

“Yeah, that sounds... Yeah, I’ll give it a try”

 

* * *

 

10\. 4. 2013; Hamburg, Germany (Transcript translated from original German)

“What do I have to do?”

“Look who’s back again! So you’ve realised how utterly screwed you are and want me to fix it? And it just so happens that I am in the business of fixing things...”

“What do you want for your help?”

“What are you offering?”

“You want money? I have access to the business accounts, I can get you all the money you want.”

“Money? Honey, I can get that anywhere. What else do you have?”

“I have access to all kinds of resources, weapons, drugs, contractors, smuggled goods, women, things she only offers to her friends...”

“If I was interested in what her business can offer me I’d be negotiating with your boss and you Honey, you’d be dead. Show a little creativity, what is your life worth?”

“I don’t know what else to offer you! Just name your price and be done with it!”

“Well if you’re going to be dull, you’re just going to owe me, until you can offer me something I actually want.”

“So you’re helping me?”

“Meet me at my place tomorrow at six and I’ll give you the details.”

 

* * *

 

11\. 4. 2013; Hamburg, Germany (Transcript translated from original German)

“I’m supposed to do what?”

“You heard what I said. Kill her, frame the husband and watch their business collapse. You can leave the country if you want, but you don’t have to. No one will pay you any mind as long as you stay out of their way, when they are fighting over their shares... Problem?”

“I – When you said you’d help me I thought you’d meant you’d help me go into hiding, not…”

“Did you really go into this line of business without expecting to have to kill someone eventually? You’re even more naïve than I thought, Honey.”

“It’s not like I had a choice in the matter!”

“Well in that case, this is a familiar scenario, Honey. You didn’t have a choice then, and you don’t have a choice now, unless you want to take your chances against a trained killer of course.”

“But I don’t know how…”

“Don’t worry Honey, killing someone is surprisingly easy, once you get over the whole moral dilemma and since in your case it’s kill or be killed that should be rather easily resolved, don’t you think?”

“So how am I supposed to do this?”

“She often has you work on the more illegal parts of her business in her house in the evening, right?”

“Yes, it makes it less likely that anyone will overhear something.”

“But those hours don’t show up on any kind of official payroll, do they?”

“No, I don’t even think anyone else knows about it.”

“Good, the next time you’re there, put this in her supply ground coffee.”

“What is it?”

“Poison, I’m not going to tell you which kind, or you might be stupid enough to google it.”

“How does framing the husband come into this?”

“I was getting there. The poison will show up in a routine forensic toxicology report, so the police will know that it was murder rather quickly. This vial has been touched by the husband and the inside is coated with the same poison. Keep it in the bag and hide it in her kitchen without touching it, make sure she won’t find it.”

“But her husband’s not even in the country right now, he barely ever is! How can he poison her, if he’s in a different country?”

“Oh, she won’t die until he returns. That’s the beauty of this little scheme, Honey. She never drinks coffee at home unless her husband is there. You should really know that, you’re the one who makes it when he isn’t in town. And her husband doesn’t drink coffee at all, which ensures that you won’t accidentally poison him.”

 

* * *

 

20\. 4. 2013;London, UK

“I saw your blog post.”

“I know; you commented. What did you think?”

“I think that was very brave of you.”

“So it was alright?”

“It’s great. Do you think it’ll help?”

“My therapist certainly thinks so.”

“And what do you think?”

“It might... It’s certainly easier to type some things out than say them... but I’m not sure about doing that on a public platform again, after...what happened last time.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s stupid, logically I know that’s not... but I just can’t help but wonder; what if... what if my blog never made him popular? The media couldn’t have turned, if they’d never even known about him, and maybe he wouldn’t have...”

 

* * *

 

29\. 4. 2013; London, UK

“I don’t see why we can’t continue on as usual, it’s just a job!”

“If he found out, I’d lose his trust, which is vital no matter how this mission turns out.”

“Oh please, he’d never find out! You’re far too good at this for that to happen!”

“I’m still not taking that risk. The stakes are too high.”

“Come on! Don’t be such a bore, if I’m going to be your handler again for such a long mission, there should be something in it for me too!”

“You are being paid for this job.”

“Money, I have enough of that for a lifetime... or three. I’d never have to work another job again if I so wished. Well, if they’d ever let you retire.”

“At least you chose this life for yourself.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy it!”

“I enjoy being alive, I enjoy not being hunted by the people who were supposed to protect me, whatever life I lead is secondary to that.”

“No, don’t give me that bullshit! I’ve been fucking you for the last ten years; I think I know you better than that. You like it rough. You love the excitement, the thrill of having someone else’s life in your crosshairs and pulling the trigger.”

“Believe what you want, you don’t know a thing about me.”

 

* * *

 

13\. 5. 2013; London, UK

“I loved your blog post yesterday! Did it really only take him 36 seconds to work that out?”

“Yeah, it did.”

“Wow, I did get there on my own, but it took me forever...”

“Yeah, he was clever like that...”

“Do you already know which case you’re going to do next?”

“I think so yes, but I’m not sure whether I should post it at all.”

“Why not? They’re really brilliant!”

“It’s been nice writing them up, but... every post just seems to bring new trolls around and that – I don’t like seeing his name smeared like that. I thought that was over when the papers lost interest and now... it’s the same thing all over again.”

“If you stop now, they’ll think they’ve won. You might not be able to convince them, but at the very least you can show them that you stand by your beliefs and that you aren’t that easily cowed.”

“I just don’t know if it’s worth the hassle, if he’d even want me to do that... He never really cared about his reputation... well apart from its influence on his ability to work cases... He never understood why I’d care... the only thing he could think of, was that I was scared that they were right... I don’t think he had any idea how much...”

 

* * *

 

16\. 5. 2013; London, UK

“I just don’t understand!”

“Have you ever been undercover? Not like you are now, you almost exclusively associate with people who know who you really are. All your other relationships, like the women you sleep with, are extremely short lived, and therefore easy to deceive. No, I mean properly undercover, playing a role 24/7, deceiving people long term.”

“What does that have to do with us? It’s not like you have to deceive me! I know you, inside and out.”

“When you’re playing that kind of role, you’re lying about all the big things, your name, your past, your skills... You can’t lie about the small things too, believe me it doesn’t work. You get caught up in a net of lies, no matter how careful you are, people start getting suspicious and sooner or later someone finds out. The trick is to lie about as few things as possible, to stick to your own personality instead of inventing a new one. And the thing is, I’ve never approved of infidelity.“

“Seriously, you want me to believe that? You, of all people, have moral qualms? You forget, I’ve seen what you’re capable of.”

“You’ve also seen what happened to the people who crossed him.”

 

* * *

 

27\. 5. 2013; London, UK

“Did you get through to the guy on your blog yesterday?”

“I can’t tell you exactly what happened, but yeah. Yeah we did... eventually... He really wasn’t in a good place, but... he’ll be alright... well, Ella thinks he will at least... I’m sorry I had to cancel our date.”

“I already told you, it’s fine. He needed you more than I did. I’m just glad he’s going to be fine.”

“Yeah, me too. I don’t know what I would have done if... Well, at least we could help him.”

“See, it’s not just haters you’re trying to convince. Your blog can actually make a difference.”

“I’m not sure if it wasn’t the post itself that triggered him, but... yeah I think you’re right.”

 

* * *

 

5\. 6. 2013; London, UK

“Why do you have to date him anyway? You’re already working with him, surely that’s enough to keep an eye on him.”

“I’ve already told you, he’s a flight risk. He’s mostly cut himself off from his friends, if he stays in London for more than a month he starts to get jumpy. If I hadn’t stepped in he would have left completely, probably with Doctors Without Borders going by the way he always looked when I talked about ‘my work‘ with them. And how would we have kept an eye on him then?”

“There are other ways to keep someone in London! There was no need to resort to such drastic measures!”

“There was, but since you never believe me anyway... maybe I just like him, maybe I just wanted a nice normal relationship for once in my life.”

“You had a relationship! With me! Someone who actually knows your real name!”

“A relationship, really? That’s what you want to call it?”

“What then?”

“The kind version? Meaningless sex over an extended period of time. What? Did you really think it was more that that? That I’d somehow fallen in love with you? The man who trapped me in this job?”

“I saved your life.”

“And sold my soul to the devil in the process.”

 

* * *

 

18\. 6. 2013; London, UK

“Well that was the last of them.”

“What? But I thought you’d decided to continue!”

“Yeah I know, but I’ve been going through my notes and the rest is either not very interesting, or under the Official Secrets Act, or posting them might hurt some of the involved people, so for now, that’s it.”

“Are you sure you couldn’t just, I don’t know... change the names or something...”

“I might for one or two, but that’s going to take time... I really don’t want to accidentally hurt somebody."

 

* * *

 

10\. 7. 2013; London, UK

“Just this once! He’s at work, he’ll never find out.”

“That’s not the point and you know it.”

“Oh come on, I miss you! What happened to the woman I knew? The one who couldn’t keep her hands off me? The one who wasn’t a frigid bitch?”

“I discarded her, once she wasn’t necessary for survival anymore.”

“You what?”

“I decided that I didn’t need to please you anymore in order to stay alive, because you can’t tattle to him anymore and our new superiors are far more reasonable. Unlike him, as long as I do my job, they are not going to punish me.”

“You can’t tell me that you didn’t want it, the way you used to beg for it, that was no act.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“You’re just talking big, you’re gagging for it!

“You’re deluded.”

“No, I don’t think so. Remember, I know you... You just want me to take what’s mine, you want me to overpower you. Strong woman like you, you need someone to take charge, put you in your rightful place. You’ve always liked that, you never wanted to admit it, but I could tell. I think I’ll do that right now, take what’s mine...”

“Do you really think you can take me? Do I have to remind you, which one of us is the trained killer? Goodbye, and stick to your role next time. You are my friend, nothing more.”

 

* * *

 

15\. 7. 2013; London, UK

“I’ve heard that you’d be willing to pay for certain kinds of information...”

“I’m in news, of course I’m interested in acquiring information, if it is worth something to me.”

“You’ll be interested in this.”

“Prove it.”

“Abigail Gloria Rebecca Altschul.”

“You know where she is?”

“I might.”

“That is indeed the kind of information I might be interested in acquiring. You are not in need of money, so what will our business transaction be?”

“I want protection. As you surely know, the network has started to crumble in the wake of His death and when it inevitably comes down, I don’t want to be caught in the rubble.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged. Any ideas as to the application of this knowledge?”

“The bitch doesn’t know what’s good for her. I say, make her suffer.”

 

* * *

 

22\. 7. 2013; Zidilje, Serbia / London, UK

“You have to return to Germany.”

“Why? Everything was going smoothly when I left.”

“Well, now it isn’t. Trepoff lodged appeal after appeal whenever they found him guilty, claiming that the judges were all biased, and don’t ask me how he did it, because I have no idea, but he somehow managed to make them hold a trial by jury, which hasn’t been part of German legislation since 1924!”

“So where’s the problem? They’ll find him guilty as well.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I have an inside man who says, Trepoff’s lawyer is making a rather convincing case that his wife’s death was suicide.”

“How? There shouldn’t be any doubt as to his guilt! The plan was completely watertight!”

“Maybe your little assassin messed up? Or you were wrong about the quality of the local police force. I told you to get involved in the investigation and see it through to the end.”

“That wasn’t an option and you know that! The situation in Greece demanded that I step in at once or I would have lost my chance there!”

“Be that as it may, it doesn’t change the mess in Hamburg. The final hearing is on the upcoming Wednesday, I’ll send a plane and you can take the place of my agent in the jury and convince them of Mr. Trepoff’s guilt.”

“Why can’t your agent do that? Leaving Serbia now would be an extremely disadvantageous move, as it would make the re-infiltration of this arm of the network almost impossible. I’ll look through the case files and provide all the intel he needs.”

“That won’t be possible. His involvement was a less-than-ideal solution. He is too afraid of the consequences and has too little to gain by it, to lie to me about the developments, but he really isn’t trustworthy enough, to let him get his hands on the kind of information someone else might be interested in buying, and the true circumstances of Mrs. Trepoff’s demise fall firmly into that category, I’m afraid.”

“Well in that case send someone else!”

“There is no one else! Everyone who is even remotely trustworthy enough to fill this role is already engaged elsewhere, most of them making sure that the other schemes you left to their own devices after setting them into motion don’t develop into similar messes. I’m sorry, but it has to be you.”

“So what about Serbia? I really don’t think I can get in a second time without blowing my cover.”

“According to my calculations, that particular cell should collapse on its own if we time the cut-off of the money supply right, as long as you manage to get the info you already gathered to Baron Maupertuis before you have to leave tomorrow evening.”

 

* * *

 

24\. 7. 2013; Hamburg, Germany (Transcript translated from original German)

“Guilty!”

“How, he has an alibi!”

“I’m sure we all agree that Mr. Trepoff had both the motive and the means to kill his wife. What he didn’t have was the opportunity, or so his lawyer claims. He walked in there and dazzled everyone with his brilliant timeline and how it would be simply impossible for him to have stopped by his house in between flights on the day his wife died and it was all so logical that none of you thought to check...

“He was right, for the average person, who is dependant on scheduled flights, it would have been. What no one took into account however is that his wife’s company owns a private jet, which he has been known to use in the past. We don’t actually know when he arrived in Rome, only that he was there when his wife was found. He could have arrived an hour after the regular flight his lawyer claimed he took without anyone being any the wiser and he would easily have had time to eat breakfast with and murder his wife.

“If you think this is too far fetched an explanation, how do you explain the testimony of her assistant? She stated that the victim always drank her morning coffee at the office, unless her husband was home, in which case she had breakfast and coffee with him. Now she had coffee at home on the day she died, which leads us to reason that her husband had to be home too.

“Then there’s the matter of her fingerprints on the vial that contained the poison, which led some people to believe that she committed suicide. How do you explain his fingerprints beneath hers then? Did he buy his wife some poison in lieu of the traditional apology bouquet after she found out about his affair? Hardly. The explanation is much simpler. He had the vial first, put the poison in her coffee, left the vial in the kitchen. His wife comes in, sees the vial and moves it out of the way not knowing what it is. Once she’s dead he’s in a hurry; he has a flight to catch and forgets to dispose of it.

“It’s amazing how none of you even questioned the lawyer’s story, well five of you are bought, but the other six? Where did they pick you up? Certainly not in Germany going by how you can’t pronounce two simple words properly. It’s ‘Nicht’ not ‘Nickt’ or ‘Niggd’ and ‘Schuldig’ or even ‘Schuldich’ but most certainly not ‘Schuldik’. You probably didn’t even understand half of what the lawyer said and decided to just go along with the opinion of those who seemed to know what they were doing. Too bad that those are getting paid for letting a murderer go free. Now everyone who wants to change their vote, go ahead. Those who don’t, I’ll report to the authorities.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to cheat so much while writing this chapter! Part of that is the fault of the makers of the show, who apparently didn't do any research about German legislation and hired actors who speak bad German... It's alright for them to make a funny little scene, but try wrangling that into some kind of reasonable plot.  
> And then there's the fact that it's impossible to find out what a standard forensic toxicology report screens for. I mean I get the reasoning behind that, but why do they have to make my life difficult?
> 
> Also, so much foreshadowing...


	16. An Unexpected Ally

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had this chapter almost finished for two weeks, but then life happened...   
> I'm going to be pretty busy until July, it's the good kind of busy, but it still has me coming home in the evening too tired to form a straight sentence in my native language, let alone an English one.

Sonderermittlerin Angelika Schnell didn’t usually have time to sit around in cafés, but it wasn’t like she was here for leisure. This was work. At least she hoped it was, the email had been rather cryptic. She took out her phone to check it again even though she already knew what it was going to say.

_Sonderinspektorin Schnell._

_You are stuck._ _You see the connections where others don’t. But you are missing pieces. I can provide those. Meet me on Friday 15:00 Cafe Einstein._

_W.  
_

The email had arrived at her personal account the day before and she had dismissed it as spam at first but her gut had told her to take a second look. It was just specific enough for it to be unlikely to be a coincidence. Because Schnell had in fact noticed connections between some of her old cases, but they were too vague for her superiors to sanction further investigation. If she was being honest they were little more than a gut instinct. However, since her gut instinct tended to be rather accurate, she wasn’t willing to let this go.

There was also the fact that whoever had written that message knew about her new title, which was rather recent and certainly hadn’t been picked up on by the news yet. It wasn’t on the homepage of the LPD either so whoever knew about it knew more than the broad public. This idea was reinforced by the email arriving at her private email account, which had given her pause. She had been targeted by stalkers and criminals before and an ostensibly work related email in her private account was just unusual enough to be potentially dangerous. However she couldn’t bring herself to dismiss the chance of getting something tangible to supplement her hunch.

Which was why her partner Franitschek was sitting a few tables away from her, enjoying a piece of Apfelstrudel with whipped cream, when he should be keeping a weather eye on the people the warm August day hadn’t lured into the Schanigarten outside. Angelika rolled her eyes at that. Franitschek may enjoy his treat a bit too much, but she knew, if things went pear shaped, she could count on him. He had saved her life before.

Angelika looked up when she heard the door of the café open. From the corner of her eye she could see her partner pause in the appreciation of his Mehlspeise. The man who had entered was tall, tanned but with a hint of sunburn betraying a usually fairer complexion, black hair cut military style and sporting a three-day-stubble. His clothes were cheap and worn and he looked as if he had been missing meals.

“Mrs. Schnell I presume? And over there your sidekick?” he nodded towards Franitschek, “don’t bother sending him away, I know how valuable it can be to have someone you trust nearby. I would not dream to deprive you of that bit of security, unnecessary though it might be.” Going by his clothes and general appearance, Angelika had expected the stranger to speak with a broad working class accent, but the stranger’s speech didn’t match his bearing, as he was using perfectly enunciated high German the likes of which was only seldom heard in Vienna.

“So you are the mysterious W. You said you have information for me.”

“I don’t have it yet, but I am planning to infiltrate a crime syndicate that is responsible for quite a few of your cases. I believe you have noticed the connections. However I will need someone to act on the information I am going to gather and since you are already working on the case, you struck me as the ideal candidate.” The man had seemed vaguely familiar to Angelika the moment he had come through the door, and the feeling was reinforced with every posh word that came out of that mouth and was so utterly incongruous with his outward appearance. She couldn’t place him though, so she decided to concentrate on the matter at hand and watch closely, since these things tended to come to her sooner or later.

“Why would you do that? Risk your life to get some random criminal organisation off the streets?”

“I like justice. No, you are not buying that, are you? Let’s just say I want them gone for my own selfish needs.” Maybe he was involved with some criminal organisation and she’d seen his face in a case file? Maybe he wanted a rival gone? No, the idea didn’t sit right. Besides which criminal would involve the authorities in a gang war, if his face was on file?

“So why me?”

“I have recently learned that involving the official authorities in the final step of elimination tends to create much smaller messes than doing it on my own and while usually, I’m not above creating a bit of chaos, right now it only draws things out and I would really like to be done with this as fast as possible. As for you personally, your record indicates that you posses some amount of intelligence and having your own team that you can use on cases of your own choosing made you the ideal candidate.”

“So how did you know about my new title?”

The stranger looked her over with a concentrated focus, like he had when he’d first entered the café, before he started to speak in a rapid fire staccato: “I know a lot more about you than just your title. You have only recently returned to work after spending some time in hospital. You are still subconsciously shielding your right side, below your ribs. In your line of work, you were shot. Your daughter has been acting out more than usual recently and you don’t know why. I would say she realised that her parents are mortal and that your job poses quite a bit of a risk. You were offered a promotion to a desk job when you returned to work, but you didn’t take it and she does not like that. You regularly see your ex-husband, you are working together, but not full-time, he is the forensic pathologist on most of your cases. Your son, I’m not sure if he is older or younger, could be twins, is failing chemistry. You got him a tutor, but that does not seem to help. That’s because he spends more time kissing her than studying in the time you are paying her. Find him a new tutor, preferably someone old and annoying. Your colleague over there, he knows that if he is staying on your team he is never going to get that promotion, but he gave up on that recently, probably when he got a taste of working on his own while you were recuperating.” Angelika told herself that the neat dissection of her life by the stranger shouldn’t inspire curiosity. In fact it should make her want to run for the hills and it had for a moment, when he had mentioned her kids, but something told her that she could trust this stranger, she felt almost as if she knew him. However she decided not to trust him, unless she found out why he seemed so dammed familiar. She wasn’t wrong about people often, but when she was it had a way of turning out absolutely disastrous. Stalker-and-serial-killer-boyfriend-disastrous, framed-for-murder-disastrous or even getting-shot-by-your-boss-disastrous.

“How can you know all this? Have you been following me?”

“I didn’t know, I saw. And there is no way I could have followed you, since I was in Rome until last night, breaking up a human trafficking ring. They were picking up people in front of the Vatican museums by offering them to skip the two hours of waiting in line and then leading them to an ‘office‘ in some side alley and hitting them over the head with a two-by-four. It never hit the news, bad for tourism and all that, you understand, but it should be in the Interpol database, since a few low level thugs escaped. You know, if you want to check my credentials.” It was the picture of a vigilante maverick running around hunting criminals that did it. Her subconscious added a coat and a hat and suddenly she knew exactly who was sitting across from her.

“Oh! I know who you are! I thought you looked familiar, but… you’re supposed to be dead!” The stranger, Sherlock Holmes, panicked. He was trying to hide it, but Angelika caught his eyes darting rapidly between her, the door, her partner, the few other customers sitting inside and the waiters. He looked like a man, desperate for an escape and the fact that he hadn’t bolted right away told her that it wasn’t just his own skin he was worried about. She was almost certain, that if she didn’t reassure him quickly he’d do something stupid to ensure her silence.

“It sucks to be framed for crimes you didn’t commit, right? Don’t worry, I’ve been there, I’m not going to rat you out. For what it’s worth, I’m glad you made it out alive.” At her words the fight seemed to drain out of Holmes, though he tried hard to keep up the appearance of wariness.

“How do you know me?”

“Well, being shot puts you out of commission quite thoroughly for some time. I was bored and surfing the Internet and found your friend’s blog. I followed the whole Moriarty/ Richard Brook affair while I was recuperating.”

“And you worked out that I was framed just from the media coverage? From what I’ve been told, that was quite a hatchet job, devoid of any facts.”

“That’s actually part of what tipped me off. They didn’t have anything resembling facts. No investigative pieces of how-he-did-it, no blow-by-blow analysis of any of your former cases with sob stories of the redeemed innocents you put behind bars. In fact barely any of them even launched an appeal, as if they knew that it wouldn’t help, because they were undoubtedly guilty. And then there were old cases like the one with the hallucinogenic gas, did they think that you started doing that when you were a kid? The whole story just didn’t make sense.”

“And yet everyone believed it.”

“You shouldn’t hold it against them, the police is trained to at least consider things they don’t want to be true. When that prison guard tried to frame me, even Franitschek investigated against me. He had to and I would have done the same thing, with the amount of evidence stacked up against me. The important thing is that when it really mattered, he stuck with me. Your friends would have realised their error soon enough too, if you had stayed and defended yourself, instead of ‘admitting your guilt’ by committing suicide.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, because in my case everyone wanted to believe that I was a fraud. Better for their egos. And the suicide, I wasn’t really given a choice about that part.”

“I thought so. That part never made sense. So now you’re doing what? Chasing criminals, while on the run yourself?”

“Hunting down Moriarty’s henchmen, so I can go home.”

“So the connected cases, they’re their work?”

“Obviously. So you’re going to help me?”

“Of course. What do you need me to do?”

“For now, nothing. I’m going to infiltrate them and send you the information I gather and when the time is right, you’re going to get a few Soko teams to raid them.”

“What do I tell my team? I guess you don’t want them to know who you really are.”

“It would indeed be better if as few people as possible knew about my continued existence. Don’t tell them unless you absolutely have to. Well if I wanna make it to my appointment with the criminal classes, I’m gonna have to go now.” With that last sentence his accent switched over from perfectly enunciated High German to a broad Viennese working class accent. It was extremely impressive and Angelika found herself wondering if he had used Mundl videos as reference.

* * *

 

The first flash drive turned up three days after their meeting. It was on Angelika’s desk when she returned from her lunch break. When she asked her team, no one had seen a thing. She handed it over to Kemal, the IT-guy, for a malware check and he returned it, commenting that if the information on it was genuine that were most of the last two years’ cold cases solved. It also contained extensive profiles of a few organised crime groups and some soundbites in which their key players unwittingly stated their names before listing their crimes by way of boasting that would make for easy convictions once they were arrested. There was also a note that more would be arriving soon and not to take any action until then.

As promised, they kept arriving every two days, over the next two weeks, unless there was a weekend in the way, until the deliveries suddenly stopped without warning. In fact, the last flash drive had included the usual ‘more to come’ note, just like all the others. When it didn’t arrive on Friday as expected, Angelika didn’t think much of it; it wasn’t like there was a schedule, but when one day turned into three, and then five, she began to worry...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been looking forward to this and the following two chapters ever since I started writing this!
> 
> It features the cast of one of my all time favorite crime dramas "Schnell ermittelt". I got the idea sa son as I'd decided this little arc was going to be set in Vienna, and then I realised how perfectly the timelines of the two shows coincided and I just couldn't resist the temptation. 
> 
> The Case in Rome was an idea I had when the same thing happened to me, just without the human trafficing ring and the two-by-four, but some clever individuals who sold tickets for guided tours that let you skip the two hours of waiting in line for twice the price of a normal ticket.


	17. A Single Mistake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has it really been over two months since I posted the last chapter that ended in a cliffhanger? I'm really sorry. I didn't expect this chapter to turn into such a monster, or real life to be quite that busy. That seemes to happen every year around May and June, but for some reason I never expect it, ~~it's like some kind of the spanish inquisition~~ . It was predominantly the good kind of stress (I appeared in a theatre production and a circus show, supervised two smaller circus shows with the kids I've been teaching over the last year and almost finished the labwork for my bachelor's thesis), but it still didn't leave me with a lot of time for writing.
> 
> Also this chapter gave me a lot of trouble and I almost deleted the whole thing several times, because I didn't think it was working the way it should. Big thanks to [scrub456](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scrub456/pseuds/scrub456) for encouraging me to keep going.
> 
> I was actually planning to post this on my birthday (1st of July), but again, life conspired to make me busy for the last two days. 
> 
> Well, better late than never, here you go, enjoy.

One last conversation, one last flash drive, and he’d be done.

With this thread of the web at least. Sherlock usually tried not to think about the vast amount still to go, as it only served to make him despondent. He especially didn’t want to think about it right now, because right now his timing was impeccable and for once he actually had something to look forward to.

He’d skipped the delivery the day before in favour of collecting the last soundbites today, then he’d spend Sunday doing research for his next job, and Monday morning would find him delivering the last flash drive as soon as the LPD opened its doors and only 180 miles, or two and a half hours by train, from John.

Sherlock hadn’t arranged it. There had been no slightly misspelled invitation that would carry John to where he needed him. There had been no important information that had to be conveyed in person that would justify the danger and logistics.

It wasn’t just a happy coincidence either, of course. John had posted about his intention to attend a medical conference in Salzburg well in advance, like he always did and Sherlock had endeavoured to switch the countries in his schedule around in a way that would allow for a meet-up.

There wasn’t really a reason for the meeting. Sherlock was well informed about the state of John’s relationship with Mary, because of the blog. Everything was going more or less according to their plan. He might try to justify the risk by arguing that some of the posts felt somehow too sincere and that he had trouble discerning the parts that were meant for him from the ones meant for Mary, but that was all just a feeling, nothing concrete, nothing quantifiable, no proof. And Sherlock Holmes didn’t deal in feelings, he dealt in facts. But still...

He should probably check on John. Just to make sure.

He hadn’t been sure that he’d be able to make it until the morning of the day before, when the last two big fish had agreed to meet them. For the past two weeks Sherlock had been posing as the long lost baby brother of Stephan Mitterbauer, one of the group’s leaders and after that first, not really chance, chance-meeting his ’big brother’ had been very happy to integrate him in his business and introduce him to all of his friends. The man still felt guilty over leaving his little brother with his abusive parents when he ran away at fourteen. His brother, who Sherlock was currently impersonating, had been six. So when Sherlock had ‘recognized’ him on the street, he decided to trust him far more quickly than he would under any other circumstances. And Sherlock was milking that trust for everything it was worth. He showed interest in the business and displayed a bit of natural skill by making good suggestions when his ‘brother’ started telling him about some of the problems they were facing and suddenly he was being groomed to be second in command and meeting all the other big players.

Those last two he was meeting today were from Ilm, the outpost in Upper Austria and, inexplicably to anyone not in the know, the village with the highest crime rate per capita in all of Austria.

Sherlock and his ‘brother’ were meeting them at Tichy, one of the oldest ice cream parlours in Vienna. It was a picturesque little place with its red-and-white striped sunblind, art deco lamps, flowers surrounding the terrace, waitresses still dressed like in the fifties and curlicued furniture. It most certainly wasn’t the kind of place where you would expect hardened criminals to meet, but it wasn’t the kind of place you’d expect in the middle of one of the typical lower class, immigrant districts either, yet there it was.

Sherlock arrived early, since his goal was to appear overly eager to be included in the business and it gave him the opportunity to observe the area, before he had to concentrate on the task at hand. Today that was to get as much info and as many names from the operations outside Vienna, so his ally in the police force could make her moves all at once, thereby reducing the chances of anyone escaping.

His ‘brother’ was the second to arrive, less than a minute before his guests. It was timed too perfectly to be coincidence as he was still in the process of sitting down when they arrived, making it clear that he hadn’t waited for them, but still allowing him to choose his seat, leaving them with their backs to the exit.

The two men from Ilm introduced themselves and his ‘brother’ gave them Sherlock’s real fake name, which meant they were on actual-first-name basis. Names on tape, check.

Sherlock’s ‘brother’ ordered the famous Eismarillenknödel for everyone, before they started talking about the last few months of business in Austria, south Germany, north Italy and the adjacent areas of Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Sherlock occasionally asked questions that made him seem interested and talented and their answers had the added benefit of revealing weak points in the network and putting some sterling evidence for the inevitable court case on tape. If this conversation continued to run this smoothly, Schnell would have no problems getting all the Cobra- and WEGA-Teams she needed and the arrests and convictions would be soon to follow.

“What are those Krümel made of,” Sherlock asked once their food had arrived.

“Don’t worry they’re just Semmelbrösel,” his ‘brother’ answered, slightly annoyed. The other two men were shooting him some slightly suspicious looks, as if Sherlock had said something out of the norm.

“Nut allergy,” he hurried to explain. The man he was impersonating had suffered from a nut allergy and Sherlock had been careful not to give himself away by eating something that would have been deadly for the other man.

The searching looks only abated slowly as the conversation moved on and Sherlock couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made some mistake, but he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. Admitting to a physical weakness might not have been the smartest move, but that would hardly make them suspicious would it? Maybe regard him as a liability they only put up with because of his ‘brother’, but it wouldn’t inspire distrust...

* * *

 

“Be careful if you’re taking on anyone new, I’ve just gotten some intel from London that the secret service is sending an undercover agent soon. He’s supposed to get here in about a week. We don’t have any info about appearance though, so just triple check everyone.” Oh shit, that was not good, not good at all. Why hadn’t Sherlock heard about that before, he had to inform Mycroft that they had a mole. High up enough to know about a mission happening here and being informed of the original planned date, well, Sherlock hadn’t even informed Mycroft about that change in plans that enabled him to meet John. The fact that there was no info on appearance really only excluded Mycroft’s PA from the equation, since she was the only person, apart from Mycroft, who would know that. He didn’t have enough data to pin them down, which meant he’d have to redo all of his planning for the next few months and change enough that even if they knew everything they wouldn’t catch him. It was really fortunate that his poker face was impeccable, because even though internally he was cursing and frantically trying to salvage as much of his original plans as possible, externally he gave no indication that the information was more than a little bit worrying and his attention never strayed from the conversation.

“London? I thought they were finished?”

“Nah that was just their boss who died. He left a power vacuum, and there was a bit of infighting in the wake of that, but they are back in business now. Their plans aren’t as good as they used to be though; we’ve had two busts due to shoddy planning since. That kind of thing never happened before.” Interesting, Sherlock already knew that London was still active, but this was the first time he’d heard about their apparent incompetence. Not that it was surprising that their planning wasn’t quite up to Moriarty’s standards anymore.

* * *

 

 “So those women, how did you call them, are they still causing trouble?” Sherlock’s ‘brother’ asked.

“Begräbnisweiber. No, they’ve been taken care of for the moment.” Well, everyone making trouble for the network was a potential ally, it might be a good idea to find out more under the guise of wanting to understand the mechanics of the organisation.

“Who?”

“A group of women in Ilm, they hang around at funerals and investigate if they think something is off. We made sure that the local police force is completely useless, before we set up camp, but those women are surprisingly efficient and make it completely impossible to have anyone killed, especially now that we aren’t getting perfectly watertight hits from London anymore.” It seemed like they might be useful if their current problems could be solved easily. Maybe he could fit them in before he met John, Ilm wasn’t that far from Salzburg.

“I’m curious, how did you get rid of them without the help from London?”

“They’re not the only ones who can be clever. We’ve framed one of them for attempted murder and she’s not getting out of that one. The rest of them we’ll keep busy with our legal team.” Was everyone framing people nowadays? And Moriarty thought he was being so creative...

“Legal team?”

“Just a bunch of lawyers, who happen to enjoy suing people. They are very effective when you want to ruin someone’s business, or make them desperate enough to accept our help.” That didn’t sound overly difficult to break up. Yes, that might just work.

* * *

 

“Verdammte Schnaken!” Sherlock swatted the mosquito that had settled down on his arm and started sucking his blood, while he had been engaged in conversation. The itching bites had the potential to seriously impair his concentration and rob him of his sleep and were therefore to be avoided at all costs, but in this case he’d been too late. Suddenly the suspicious looks were back with twice the intensity as before and when one of the guests asked: “You grew up in Vienna, didn’t you,” Sherlock knew the game was up. He still didn’t know where he had fucked up, but it was clear that he had from the tone the question had been asked in. The tone that said, I don’ believe that for one second and I dare you to say yes. It was a tone Sherlock was intimately familiar with, as he himself had used it on numerous occasions on cases to get the suspects to contradict themselves.

A quick look towards his ‘brother’ and his expression of horrified revelation told Sherlock that the situation couldn’t be salvaged. Whatever his mistake had been, it must’ve been dire if even his ‘brother’ had noticed it, who had trusted him from the very beginning and had missed so many of Sherlock’s initial fumbles while he’d still been getting to know the character he was playing.

There was nothing for it but to run before they knew that he knew that they knew and remembered that they had people nearby they could call on to deal with the spy in their midst. The only saving grace of the situation was that he had already gathered enough information for Schnell to topple the whole organisation at once.

Escaping through the main entrance was out, because that would give the two men from Ilm an advantage since they were seated closer to it. Instead Sherlock chose the side entrance that lead to the terrace, which he was closer to than any of his tablemates.

Before his silence could get long enough to be suspicious in itself, Sherlock jumped up, throwing his chair in front of the closer one of his ‘brother’s guests and made a dash towards the terrace, deliberately upending any unoccupied chairs he came across, hoping to slow his pursuers down. A shriek and the clash of glass and metal behind him told him that he had tripped a waitress, adding to the chaos and right now chaos in his wake was working in his favour. Once he’d reached the terrace Sherlock decided against going right, to the actual exit, since that would bring him closer to the main entrance again and the sounds behind him told him that at least one of the men had run for the main exit hoping to cut him off instead of braving the chaos on the way to the terrace. Rather he jumped from a chair to a table and from there over the balustrade and to the ground on the other side, taking down a flower box in the process, but maintaining his lead.

He sprinted across the street and into the park on the other side. Sherlock was glad he’d explored the area before the ill fated meeting, because now he knew that there was a U-Bahn station in this park, where he might be able to lose his pursuers in the crowd. If he was really lucky he might even be able to catch a U-Bahn just as it was leaving and leave them far behind, before the chase even started properly. In that case any coordinated search would have to cover a lot of ground since the Hauptbahnhof was only two stops away, and from there he could go anywhere. That would probably give him enough time to get the last recording to Schnell and leave the city before anyone could catch up to him. The station he was currently at, Reumannplatz, was the final stop of the U1 Line though so the chances of that were only half as good as they would be on most other stations...

All of this was running through Sherlock’s head as he belted down the stairs into the station and he was already busy plotting out the best route when he spotted the display telling him he was out of luck. The next train would be leaving in 2 minutes, easily enough for his pursuers to catch up to him.

He obviously couldn’t go back the way he came so he quickly made his way to the second exit on the other side of the station. Once he got to the exit he ran up the escalator and emerged on a rather busy shopping street. If the map in his head was correct, and it was, it might not be as detailed as the one he had of London, but Sherlock had made a point of at least roughly memorizing the layout of every city he worked in and the past two weeks had given him further opportunity to learn, this street would follow the course of the U1 and eventually lead him to Hauptbahnhof, which was the closest big public transport junction. It was also too busy to kill someone without anyone noticing, which was another point in favour of following it. Sherlock kept going at an all out sprint, because he knew he was in better shape than his current pursuers and would be able to sustain the punishing pace much longer. What counted now was to put as much distance as possible between them, so he’d be able to throw them off, when the opportunity arose.

He spotted his first opportunity when he came to the next U-Bahn station 2.5 minutes after entering the first. Considering the average speed of the local trains and the accuracy of departure displays, there was a good chance that he’d be able to catch the train that had been too late for him at the previous station and leave the pursuit behind on the platform. Sherlock quickly made his way down into the underpass that connected the two sides of a busy street, allowing pedestrians to eschew the traffic lights, and also served as the entrance to the station in question.

His calculations were proven right when he reached the platform. The last people had already gotten on the train, but the doors were still open, so Sherlock quickly jumped on and made his way further into the full, but not packed carriage. Just as the completely incomprehensible announcement of what was probably supposed to be “Einsteigen bitte, Zug fährt ab” was sounded and the lights above the doors blinked, Sherlock saw, to his horror, his pursuers barrel onto the platform, but the doors were already closing and for a moment it looked like they’d be left behind, but then one of the imbeciles on the train decided to be friendly and stick a hand into the door to let the poor hurried criminals in.

Sherlock started shoving his way through the throng of people filling the train with renewed vigour, trying to get as far away from the men following him as possible. He’d been lucky to catch one of the newer trains that went all the way trough from end to end instead of being separated into multiple cars, which meant he wouldn’t be caught in a dead end anytime soon, the amount of people in his way making it unlikely to reach the other end of the train before they’d reach the next station.

However, being slowed down and forced to elbow their way through the crowd gave his pursuers the opportunity to reach for their phones and call for reinforcements to be stationed at all possible exit points. Thankfully the train reached Hauptbahnhof before anyone would have the time to respond to these calls.

Sherlock left the train as soon as it stopped again at full tilt, not caring if he jostled anyone, again leaving chaos and angry pedestrians in his wake could only work in his favour at the moment. While he ran he cursed the layout of the station, because the men pursuing him were cutting him off from the shortest way to the rest of public transport located at this junction, which forced him to make his way to an exit opening to some side street and backtrack to the actual station above the ground. That meant crossing a big intersection, completely ignoring the traffic lights. In London he’d know how the lights were programmed and could easily spot the least dangerous route across, but here he was unfamiliar with both the layout and the programming, so he was left to guess. He chose a route with crossings that seemed to provide clear sight for the cars, because he wasn’t going to look if they’d stop for him.

Sherlock made it to the main station to the sound of screeching tyres and obscenities yelled out of car windows, but he didn’t look back. Instead he was taking in the terrain in front of him. The station was still partly under construction, fabric covered metal fences cordoning off the areas where during the week work was being done, but today was Saturday and there should be no one there. Sherlock rounded a corner and before his pursuers could get him back in their sights, slipped behind one of the barriers, the advertisements covering it hiding him from view. He listened to the confused shouts when the men behind him came around the corner and he was nowhere in sight. While they were discussing what to do now and one of them called their backup to relay what happened, Sherlock picked up an abandoned cap and turned his t-shirt inside out to hide the print. They decided to split up to look for him and once they were gone, Sherlock made his now disguised way over to the platforms. The city would soon be swarming with his ‘brother’s’ men and some regional train that would get him out of here sounded like a good idea right about now. He’d have to figure out a way to get the last recording to Schnell, but that was a problem for later.

There was a train leaving for Bratislava on platform 12 that had numerous stops for Sherlock to pick from. It was as good as any other train and he was quickly making his way to the platform, when he heard someone shout. He’d been spotted. However the doors to the train were already closing and if he could just squeeze in, he could still leave his pursuers behind.

Sherlock spent the five minutes to the next stop looking up the next few stations on Google Maps and weighing his options. He’d lost his chance of quickly leaving the city and going to ground in some backwater village until they stopped looking, when he’d been spotted getting on this train. Having spent the last two weeks in their company, Sherlock knew they were horribly efficient. Once the alert had gone out, the progress of his train would be monitored closely and they’d have operatives watching the stations inside of the next fifteen minutes, the exact time frame depending on the distance of the closest of their people to the first few stops. Therefore it would probably be best to get off the train as quickly as possible in order to reduce the risk of someone already waiting for him when he got off. The drawback to that strategy was that the next station was a very small one with only a few options for changing to some other mode of transportation. He also wasn’t familiar with the area, since there was only so much information you could gain from a cursory glance over Google Maps. He’d have to risk it though, since the stop after it wasn’t any better and after that too much time would have passed for an undetected escape to be likely.

The station Grillgasse only had a single staircase leading away from its single platform to a footbridge leading to the streets on both sides of the rails. There was supposed to be a bus station somewhere, but Sherlock wasn’t sure where, because apparently this station was too small to warrant proper signage and Google Maps was chronically unreliable in that regard. It should be on the left side, but – There! Through the foliage of some trees Sherlock could just barely make out a bus shelter on the street to his left, so that’s where he went. He could also see a petrol station on the same side a bit further away. If no bus made an appearance soon, Sherlock might be able to steal an unattended car there. That would draw attention, but it wasn’t more than five minutes to the highway from here and from there he’d have a lot of options, which meant a lot of ground for the network to cover.

He was just starting to make his way down the stairs, when a man rounded the corner from behind a small dinghy tavern called Sabine’s Ranch. Sherlock recognized him immediately as Jörg, part of the muscle of the organisation. Sherlock also saw him realise that his quarry was right in front of him, before he turned around and ran across the flyover and down the stairs on the other side. There were even more trees on this side of the tracks, lining the street that was running parallel to the rails. While Sherlock was flying down the stairs he quickly went trough his options. The street was out, since he couldn’t make out any intersections until it curved away in the distance. The man chasing him now was part of the foot soldiers of the organization and therefore well versed in legwork. In contrast to his first bunch of pursuers he was in good shape and Sherlock didn’t think he’d be able to simply outrun him. Sherlock thought he could probably take his new pursuer in a fight, but he didn’t know how well armed the man was, and Sherlock himself only had a small knife hidden in his boot, so he’d rather not take the risk. His only other option was a short packed-dirt path leading into the tree line surrounding a park.

When Sherlock emerged from the trees there were a few rows of typical suburban houses with little gardens to his right, but the streets between them didn’t seem to have any more intersections to offer than the one he’d just come from, so he decided to follow the paved road, the dirt path had merged into, further into the park, hoping that he might be able to loose the pursuit somewhere between the trees. Another bonus of staying in the park was that there were plenty of people about, walking their dogs, or just out enjoying the day. Sherlock knew that the organisation wanted to keep a low profile and trained their operatives accordingly, so even if the man caught up to him now, he probably wouldn’t want to cause a scene, which would significantly lower Sherlock’s chances of being killed on the spot.

Sherlock followed the road, which quickly turned back into a dirt track, up a hill and past a playground. To his right he could hear the unmistakeable sounds of an amusement park, which meant crowds. However, Sherlock never got the opportunity to disappear between the stalls, because before he could enter the grounds, he saw another familiar-looking man running in his general direction from a building at the entrance of the amusement park. A cry of “Matthi” from behind him told Sherlock that his first pursuer had also noticed the newcomer and ensured that he changed his course from Sherlock’s general direction, which was also the direction of the train station, to coming directly at him, forcing Sherlock to recalculate.

The addition of a second pursuer wasn’t as much of a problem as the fact that he was now cut off from the crowds of the amusement park, since he hadn’t been planning on fighting them anyway. It might make it easier for the two of them to corner him, but only if they were used to working together, as that needed a fair amount coordination. Apart from that, their numbers would only aid them if they caught him first. The bigger issue at the moment was the necessary change in his route.

He couldn’t continue straight ahead or turn right towards the access road, since the position of the second man would make it easy to cut him off. Turning back was obviously out of the question, which left him with the parking lot to his left and the dirt track leading away from it, parallel to the amusement park. If he followed that, maybe he could find another entrance and take advantage of the crowds then.

He resisted the urge to turn around to see if the change in direction had affected his advantage for better or worse since that would slow him down and increase the risk of tripping over something. Instead Sherlock concentrated on filtering out his own ragged breaths and thundering feet and listened for his pursuers. The closer one of the two, who had been following him since the station, was breathing just as hard as Sherlock. He wasn’t the one Sherlock was most concerned with, since he hadn’t gained on him substantially since he’d started the chase and seemed to have a similar endurance as Sherlock himself. The newcomer however was a different pair of shoes. He was still further back than the first man due to his unfortunate positioning when he’d started his pursuit, but he seemed to be slowly but steadily gaining on him and from the sound of it he was barely winded at all yet.

When Sherlock got to a fork in the path he decided to continue along the high fence walling in the amusement park. It was too high to climb quickly enough here, but he still hoped to get in at some point. He realised his mistake a few hundred yards later when that fence met another one creating an almost dead end. Almost, because there was a climbable gate in the other fence, leading into a forest area. It wasn’t nearly as ideal as a crowded amusement park, but at least he wasn’t stuck.

Without stopping, he quickly scanned the map of the area that was attached to the fence, then scaled the gate into the wood, not wasting time to see if it was unlocked and not wanting to lose time closing it after himself or save his pursuers the time of opening it and made his way along the path into the wood.

Behind him Matthi had caught up to Jörg and they were whispering. Sherlock couldn’t make out the words, but the fact that they were talking at all was a good sign, since it meant that they weren’t well coordinated. Back in London he and John hadn’t needed more than a few gestures and looks to corner a suspect. After their conversation one of them, probably Jörg, since he was more out of breath, fell back a bit while digging his phone out off his pocket. Damn, they were calling in reinforcements. This time the voice was loud enough for Sherlock to understand:

“Flo, where are you, Matthi and me, we found him.

-

“Chasing him right now, thought you could cut him off.

-

“We’ll be at the south-east gate of the Laaer Wald in a few minutes.”

Shit, he was running into a trap, he needed to change directions NOW. No fork in sight. The undergrowth then, he could still see the wire mesh fence surrounding the wood to his left, difficult to climb, so to the right it was.

Sherlock waited until there was a gap between trees and shrubs, then suddenly veered right, quickly navigating between the trees. He was glad that the men weren’t used to chasing people together, since the change from one easily traversed path surrounded by more difficult terrain, to all around difficult terrain would potentially make it easier for them to cut him off, since there was no advantage to blindly following his path anymore. He was in enough trouble without having to worry about that.

If he’d read the map right, Sherlock was now moving away from the populated park area and once he reached the other side of the wood he’d probably have to find a gate before he could leave it. Meanwhile he was getting closer to exhaustion, his legs were getting heavier with every step, his lungs were burning and he was dripping with sweat and while he at least wasn’t running in the blazing sun anymore the heavy afternoon heat wasn’t helping his condition either. At least one of his pursuers was suffering similarly, since he’d been following since the station and the other one wasn’t breathing quite as easily either anymore. Sherlock was listening closely to find out whether they would split up so they could cut him off, the sooner he knew the sooner he could –

All his air was suddenly forced from his lungs, as Sherlock collided with the ground. His palms were stinging where they had absorbed the impact and his ears were ringing with the shock of arrested momentum. It didn’t even take a second for his brain to come back online and to realise what must have happened. Tripped over a root most likely.

He needed to get up. There were no people around, they wouldn’t hesitate to attack him – kill him, if that was their goal.

So get up! Back on his feet and running!

Pain. His ankle was screaming. Probably twisted it in the fall. It would take his weight if it had to, but it would slow him down. He couldn’t outrun them, not like this.

Flight failed. Time for fight.

Sherlock turned to face the two men running towards him and assumed a fighting stance. There was no time to draw his knife from his shoe and still be ready in time for the first attack. Being caught off guard with a knife in your hand was more dangerous than without a knife, since your opponent had a good chance of appropriating the knife if you weren’t ready for the attack. Better be ready and unarmed.

The two men were several yards apart, which meant that they wouldn’t come at him all at once. He’d have to make the first few punches count, to at least temporarily incapacitate Matthi, the first attacker, before Jörg could throw himself into the fray.

Matthi was rushing at him with a battering-ram approach, aiming to tackle Sherlock to the ground, taking full advantage of his momentum. Not the most refined tactic, but largely effective. Sherlock waited until there was no chance for the man to correct his course in time, before he pivoted to the side and, in the same movement, threw his leg between his attacker’s feet, making him stumble. The manoeuvre was hell on his twisted ankle, but Sherlock pushed through the pain, sending his already unbalanced opponent to the ground with a well placed fist to the kidney, before he turned around again to brace for the impact of the second man, which should be happening. Right. Now.

It never came.

Instead of trying to attack Sherlock while he was off guard and failing, Jörg had stopped to draw a knife. The fight had just become a lot deadlier.

The man was approaching slowly, but Sherlock didn’t have the time to wait for the attack to come, because from the sound of it, Matthi was already struggling to get back on his feet. So he deliberately made a mistake, taking his eyes off of Jörg to see how far along the other man was in his effort to get up. He looked back immediately and sure enough the man with the knife had seized the moment of apparent inattention and was flying at him, with the knife aimed at Sherlock’s abdomen.

Sherlock had been expecting the attack though and made a grab for the man’s wrist, deflecting the knife and trying to get a good enough grip so he could twist and force him to drop it. However, his new opponent turned out to be a more adept fighter than Sherlock had expected and managed to twist out of Sherlock’s grip, before he could get him to drop the knife.

They continued struggling for the knife. Sherlock mostly managed to evade his opponent’s attacks, but still sustained some more or less shallow cuts on his hands and arms. At the same time he was hyper aware of the other man picking himself up from the ground and getting ready to join the fight. There wasn’t much he could do about that though, short of disarming his current assailant more quickly, because the moment took his eyes off the knife, he’d be skewered. He tried to manoeuvre away from that second threat, but Jörg had also noticed Matthi getting back to his feet and actively steered Sherlock in his direction.

Sherlock had just deflected another attempt to stab him and delivered a punch of his own, when he felt an arm wrap around his neck and another behind his head. He could still breathe more or less freely, though. Blood choke then. Unconsciousness in less than ten seconds. To be avoided at all costs. Meanwhile the knife was coming towards his chest again. Since his arms were still free, he’d probably be able to fend it off, but that would take time he didn’t have and he’d be unconscious and at the mercy of the network shortly afterwards. However, the angle of the knife wasn’t perfect, so there was about an 85% chance that it would bounce off a rib, instead of puncturing a lung.

So Sherlock made a choice.

Ignore the knife and get out of the chokehold instead.

He drove his elbow into the Matthi’s left side, trying to aim for the same spot he had targeted before, when the man had tried to tackle him. At the same time he stomped down hard on his left foot and once he had unbalanced the man sufficiently, hooked his own right foot behind the other man’s and pushed backwards. Before they started falling properly though, the knife found its home, slicing deep into Sherlock’s right pectoral before, as expected, bouncing off his ribs and sliding off to the side, widening the cut further in the process.

It hurt much worse than Sherlock had anticipated and it took him a moment to get his bearings enough to squirm out of the other man’s grasp. The only reason he managed at all was that, while they were falling, the Matthi had removed his hand from the back of Sherlock’s head, in an effort to break his fall. That gave Sherlock’s head enough leeway to slam into the attacker’s nose once they hit the ground, breaking his attackers nose and stunning him long enough for Sherlock to breathe through the pain and start acting. He extracted his own knife from where it was stuck in his shoe and flicked it open. After shooting a quick glance at Jörg, who was crouched over – picking up his knife, lost his grip on it when it failed to kill Sherlock –giving Sherlock the time he needed to cut the throat of the man on the ground, before he could get up and join the fight.

One man down, one more to go. That didn’t mean that the odds were looking good for Sherlock. He was bleeding freely, both from the deep gash in his chest and some of the deeper cuts on his arms and when he tried to get up to face the remaining foe his ankle almost gave out under him. The only saving grace was that he too had a knife now, which meant that his opponent had to be more careful in attacking him, which was probably why he hadn’t done so yet. The man was still standing where he had dropped his knife and was staring – Oh! He wasn’t being careful of the knife. He was shocked because of the sudden death of his colleague (friend?). He hadn’t expected this impromptu mission to be dangerous and the new reality hadn’t quite settled yet, which meant it was still malleable. And Sherlock was going to take full advantage of that fact. Right now the man was probably thinking of him as _more dangerous than expected, but injured and on the ground_ , Sherlock was going to try and warp that into _Jesus fucking Christ so much more dangerous than expected and apparently doesn’t feel any pain whatsoever_. Because scared men made mistakes.

Sherlock was still crouched on the ground after his ankle had abandoned him and had only glanced over to his remaining opponent to make sure he wasn’t attacking while he got his body fully under his control again. Now he slowly but deliberately raised his head and caught the other man’s eye, who stopped staring at the body on the ground and angrily glared at Sherlock instead. He’d bitten his tongue when his head had smashed the dead man’s nose, the pain of it was barely registering between the more serious injuries, but he could taste the blood. He made sure to spread it liberally all over his mouth before he broke out into the most unsettling of his fake smiles, the one that practically screamed psychopath. Going by the other man’s expression, the effect was even better with bloodstained teeth. Or maybe it was the spray of arterial blood on his face.

Then slowly, but with an air of deliberation, eyes fixed on his opponent, he got fully to his feet. Predatory grin firmly in place, he kept his features under control and the wince off them when he put weight on his injured ankle.

The remaining man looked ready to piss himself, and Sherlock hoped that if he terrified him a little bit more, he might turn tail and run, so Sherlock wouldn’t have to fight anymore. He really didn’t feel up for more fighting. Now that he was standing up, he felt how dizzy he really was, that nose had probably given him a mild concussion. It was a good thing he’d gotten up so slowly, otherwise he might have passed out. Sherlock didn’t think he was in danger of bleeding out, but the blood loss wasn’t helping either and by now any movement hurt and that was with all that adrenalin coursing through his body. He didn’t want to know how he’d feel once this was over and the endogenous opiates abandoned him.

Sherlock took another deliberate step towards his enemy, then turned his attention to the bloody knife in his hand and did the weirdest and most creepy thing he could think of. He carefully ran his finger along the length of the blade almost like a caress, wiping off some of the blood. For a moment he stared hungrily at his finger, before he reverently licked the blood off it. The finger came away more bloody than before and Sherlock suppressed a shudder. He was just glad that he didn’t really taste it since his mouth was still full of the flavour of his own blood.

The man looked positively green now and when Sherlock flicked his gaze back up to him, giving him the same hungry look he’d given his knife only moments prior, he was spurred into action. However he didn’t flee like Sherlock had hoped, instead he launched himself at Sherlock with a scream, knife held aloft, his movements full of terrified desperation.

Sherlock stumbled back in surprise but managed to bring his own knife into position and grab the arm wielding the knife before the momentum of his attacker bowled him over and they crashed to the ground. The other man had managed to grab onto Sherlock’s knife-hand too and now they were locked in a deadly embrace, both trying to keep the opponent’s knife away from themselves, while at the same time trying to break the other’s grip on their wrists. Sherlock could feel his arm tremble, threatening to fold under the strain, but before it got that far he hooked one leg behind his opponent’s and pushed with the other, throwing the other man off and reversing their positions.

Both men lost their grips on the other’s wrist during the manoeuvre, but since his attacker hadn’t expected the sudden movement, his aim was off and instead of finding its home in Sherlock’s throat it only sank into the meat of his upper arm. Sherlock however had corrected for the movement and ignoring the sharp pain of another knife-wound he sank his own knife into his enemy’s stomach.

The man was screaming. It was going to attract attention, probably already had. Sherlock needed him to stop. Sherlock tightened his grip on his knife and drove it into the man’s stomach again.

And again.

And again.

Until the man stopped screaming.

Then he fled the scene.

He made his way to the other side of the wood, staying away from the paths. He looked like he had murdered someone. He had murdered someone. Well, technically it had been self-defence. More or less. The second one was debateable. He could have just left him there. A hysterical giggle escaped him. Sherlock blamed it on the adrenalin. He’d just killed two people. He hadn’t... done that before. He’d never needed to. He’d been responsible of course, but he’d never just... taken the knife... and stabbed...or sliced. He’d just schemed... until someone else... did the deed.

When he reached the edge of the wood he climbed the gate into the adjacent allotment club. There were probably guards at the gates. He couldn’t fight again. He needed to get clean. Wash the blood off his face. Get fresh clothes. If someone saw him now they’d call the police. There was a pool in the garden to his right. Climbing another fence hurt. It hardly mattered. Everything hurt. Regardless of what he was doing.

Sherlock rinsed the blood off his face and arms. The hypochlorite in the water might help ward off infection. Or it might not. Warding off infection was John’s job. He hoped that the residents were out. He should probably deduce that. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t climbing to a different pool.

When the water stopped turning pink when it touched his skin Sherlock went into the garden shed, to look for a first aid kit. He was lucky enough to find one, and though it didn’t hold a candle to the one John kept at home it contained enough supplies to apply pressure bandages to the bigger gashes. No antibiotics or painkillers though. He’d have to grit his teeth and rely on his immune system there.

He shucked his shirt, because even bandaged, going bare-chested would attract less attention than his bloodstained shirt. His trousers would have to serve for now, though. They’d gotten their share of bloodstains, but they were a darker material than the shirt and Sherlock hoped they’d just look wet to the casual observer. Well, non-observer. Normal people couldn’t tell if you just killed someone. That was Sherlock’s job. Unless he’d done the killing. Bit of a conflict of interest. And he could hardly interview himself. He’d have to refuse the case. He’d tell Lestrade that it was too pedestrian. Barely a four. Not worth leaving the bed for. He just wanted to sleep...

_No! Focus! Get up! You can’t sleep now! You’re not in London, you’re not going to work this case. You need to get away._

He needed a plan. Couldn’t go back to his current safe house. His ‘brother’ knew its approximate location. There would be people on the lookout. Request a new one then. Call Mycroft. Or just stay here and let him extract you. He’d count it as a failure. Doesn’t matter. He’d count it as a failure either way. Sherlock didn’t even know what he’d done wrong. Mycroft would know. And gloat about it. Sherlock barely cared. He just wanted to sleep. Preferably somewhere safe.

His mobile wasn’t in his pocket. Must have fallen out during the fight. Should have checked before he fled. Couldn’t go back now. Another thing for Mycroft to be smug about. Except, he couldn’t call Mycroft without his phone. Only authorized numbers could call Mycroft directly, everyone else was redirected to a minion. And somewhere in Mycroft’s closer circle there was a leak. His only options to reach his brother were his own phone and the landline of a safe house. Sherlock had access to neither.

Schnell might be able to help him. At the very least she could hide him in a cell for a few days. Maybe she’d be able to get his phone from the evidence when the bodies were found. It would have to be before they tried to crack it though. It would self destruct at the slightest sign of tempering. Yes, he’d try to get to her.

On the other hand, he’d just killed two people. She was helping him because he wasn’t a murderer. Which wasn’t true any longer. She might still help him. If she believed the self defence. Or he could use today’s recording as a bartering chip. That would only work if she still trusted him, though. If she didn’t, she might disregard the information he’d gathered altogether. Which would be a complete disaster. In that case it would be better if he just vanished and left her to act on what he’d given her up until now.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t work out how likely each outcome was. He couldn’t think.

In the absence of helpful data Sherlock decided not to risk it.

Which left him with no options again.

Well, there was one more ally. Or would be. The day after tomorrow John would arrive in Salzburg. John. Salzburg. He’d have to take a train. Get to the train station first. Westbahnhof. Other side of Vienna. Evade the network. Then survive a night and a day in Salzburg. No one to trust there. But John. John could patch him up. He’d surprise him. Hadn’t done that in too long. John liked surprises. Good ones anyway. This would count as good, wouldn’t it? Seeing Sherlock. John liked Sherlock. Good surprise. Seeing Sherlock hurt. John didn’t like it when he was hurt. Bad surprise?

Didn’t matter. John.

Sherlock left the shed, still exhausted and in far too much pain, but with new resolve.

He was going to see John.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope I got the chase and fight scenes right, I'm afraid Sherlock's extensive thinking takes out too much of the pace, but there was just no way he'd be chased without his brain kicking into overdrive.
> 
> The village of Ilm is another nod to one of my favorite Austrian crime dramas, "Vier Frauen und ein Todesfall". As the title says it's about four women who solve murders in some backwater village. They hang around at funerals until one of them says: "Oiso I glob ned, das des a Unfoi woa!" (Well, I don't believe that was an accident) and then they investigate. One of the things I like about the series is that it actually acknowledges the abnormally high crime rate in Ilm and the psychological effects that has on the population.
> 
> I absolutely loved putting all my native knowledge of Vienna to use in this chapter, plotting out Sherlock's route and just letting all those details flow in.


	18. An Eye-Opening Conference

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I thought the last chapter was a monster, but compared to this one it was harmless. It just wouldn't end. I'd write over a thousand words in a single day and be super proud of myself (don't judge me, English isn't my first language and that's quite a lot for me) and then I'd realise that I barely made a dent in my list-of-things-to-include-in-this-chapter. I thought about splitting it, but there didn't seem to be a convenient stopping point so have fun with this 13000 word monster, I guess.  
> Oh, and I have no medical background, microbiology and biochemistry are as close as I get, so if you spot any mistakes there, please tell me. Obviously that also goes for any other mistakes you might find or suggestions you might have.

John had only meant to stop at the hotel for a minute to drop off his suitcase, before heading out again. However the girl at the reception had informed him that his room was already ready, despite it not officially being check-in time yet and handed him a key-card.

He’d initially planned on wandering around the inner city a bit until it was time to meet his colleagues for lunch, but since he was already here, he decided to unpack first, maybe have a quick shower and a change of clothes too, while he was at it. The August heat had hit him rather hard when he’d left the air-conditioned airport.

It was while he was putting away his clothes that he first noticed the smell. It was faint, but unpleasant. John briefly considered walking back to the reception to complain, but they had already been very nice about letting him into his room early, so he decided to try and find out what was causing the smell instead. Maybe it would turn out to be something easily resolved like some forgotten food from the guests prior to him.

The smell seemed to be coming from the bed, but a quick unmaking of the bed turned up nothing, maybe something had rolled under-

There was someone under his bed!

John quickly took two steps back and frantically looked around for a weapon. He settled for the lamp on the nightstand and braced for an attack that never came.

Alright, don’t panic. There’s someone in the room with you, currently hiding under the bed. Asses the threat. John hadn’t seen much in his quick glance under the bed. The person had been lying on their side, with their back to John, facing the door. Like they’d been waiting for John to come in. Why then, hadn’t they reacted, when he did enter? His first thought, upon finding an intruder in his room, had been: Assassin. Someone had found out that Sherlock was alive and informed Mary who had sent someone after him. Now that he was thinking about it that didn’t seem very likely anymore. Mary could have just waited for him to get home and killed him herself, except maybe Sherlock was going to warn him and she had tried to get to John before he could? That still wouldn’t explain why he hadn’t been attacked the moment he entered the room.

John was just trying to come up with another explanation, when he heard it. He almost laughed out loud, was that – Yes there it was again! Whoever was under the bed was asleep, and snoring. Well if it was an assassin, it was a bloody incompetent one, smelling badly enough that John had found them by smell alone and then falling asleep on the job. That at least proved that it wasn’t Mary who sent them, she was cleverer than that.

Another snore prompted John to risk another look under the bed. The figure under it was still facing away from John, curled up into a tight little ball and... shivering? Yes, they ware barely visible, but there were tiny tremors shaking the body in front of him periodically. The assassin-theory seemed less and less likely. Did Sherlock have a homeless-network in other countries? That would certainly explain the smell.

John certainly couldn’t tell anyone, at least until he was sure, that they hadn’t been sent by Sherlock. He couldn’t just leave them there either, so he decided to investigate by carefully prodding their shoulder.

It was remarkable how fast the lump under the bed went from deeply asleep to snarling and brandishing a knife to whispering “John” and lying back down on the floor under the bed.

“Jesus, Sherlock!” John exclaimed, and when that didn’t elicit a response from Sherlock, who was now lying on his back, not looking at John: “Come on let’s get you out of there... And preferably under a shower.” Still no response. “Sherlock?” He tried another gentle nudge to Sherlock’s arm. Worry was starting to creep in, intensifying when Sherlock flinched away from his touch and let out a small whimper. That was when he noticed the bandage peeking out of the sleeve of Sherlock’s t-shirt.

Paradoxically this both served to calm John and increase his worry. Sherlock being injured certainly wasn’t a good thing, but it did explain the flinch and the whimper and now that John was looking for it, it was obvious that the sudden movement of being woken up had irritated his injury (injuries?) and he was now trying to breathe through the pain, which to a certain extent also explained the unresponsiveness. And physical damage, John could deal with, had been trained to deal with.

John tried again: “Sherlock I know you’re in pain, but I can’t do anything about that when you’re hiding under the bed. Please let me help?”

“’m not hiding,” Sherlock grumbled, but he finally took John’s offered hand and let himself be pulled out from under the bed.

If he hadn’t been so worried about Sherlock, John would have laughed at his attire. He was wearing a t-shirt with a colourful print and... were those swimming trunks? Back home Sherlock wouldn’t be caught dead, dressed like that. Sherlock had stayed almost silent while John helped him crawl out from under the bed, but he couldn’t stifle a few sharp hisses of pain when his injuries (John was almost sure that there were more than just the one he’d spotted) were jostled. and now that he wasn’t hidden in the shadows anymore, John saw how awful Sherlock was looking overall, but he seemed adamant not to let John see how much pain he really was in, so John decided to let him keep that small measure of dignity and kept up the light conversation, while Sherlock got his bearings.

“What are you calling it then?”

“A precaution against nosy hotel personnel? Not getting myself killed before you could get here?” Sherlock’s face was still tight with pain and he looked pale despite his uncharacteristic tan, but he seemed to have gotten himself together, since he stretched out his hand as a silent request. John helped him to his feet, but wasn’t surprised when he soon was supporting most of Sherlock’s weight. They stumbled the few steps to the bed, where John sat Sherlock down, before walking over to his bag. He’d never been gladder that he never, ever travelled without a properly stocked first aid kit.

Next he rummaged around his bag for a granola bar (another thing he usually carried with him) and fetched a glass of water from the en suite.

“Knowing you, that dizzy spell was at least partly because you haven’t had anything for a while?”

“Mhm.”

“Thought so. Eat, drink, then I’ll give you something for the pain.”

That Sherlock just took what John had given him without complaint worried him more than anything else. He’d treated Sherlock for minor injuries often enough to know that taking painkillers on an empty stomach usually didn’t agree with him and he also knew that Sherlock would complain about the food every single time anyway. So to see him so docile had alarm bells shrilling in John’s head.

Once the food and the painkillers were done with, John turned his attention to Sherlock’s body. His hands and forearms were littered with small cuts that looked about two days old and were left untreated. A few of them were red and angry with infection. They were clearly defensive wounds.

“Knife fight?” John asked, trying to get Sherlock’s attention, who was slowly falling asleep again, now that the adrenalin was fading. Maybe the uncharacteristic docility was just exhaustion. The only answer he got was a noncommittal grunt.

“Hey, don’t fall asleep now, I need to treat those first. Then you can even sleep in the bed, instead of under it.” That got a weak smile from Sherlock and his cooperation in removing his shirt. Raising his injured arm provoked another hiss of pain, but he seemed a bit more alert now. There was another bandage around Sherlock’s chest, which, like the one on his arm, was sweat stained and didn’t look like it had been changed since it was first applied, judging by the bloody fingerprints that adorned them. John kept up the conversation while he unwrapped them, as much to distract himself form the fear of what lay beneath them, as to keep Sherlock awake.

“So, was I right? Was it a knife fight?”

“Mhm. Yeah, there were... knifes... involved.”

“How did that happen?”

“No idea,” Sherlock shrugged. Shit, did he have to worry about brain injury on top of everything else? He’d just finished uncovering the cut on Sherlock’s upper arm, probably a stab wound from the look of it, though it was hard to tell, it being swollen with inflammation and oozing pus as it was.

“You don’t know what happened?” John couldn’t keep the alarm out of his voice, which wasn’t exactly good bedside manner, but at least Sherlock seemed to pick up on it and was quick to reassure him.

“I know _what_ happened, what I don’t know is _why_. One minute I was talking to them and suddenly they were chasing me. Must’ve said something wrong, but what?” John had started on the second bandage while Sherlock was talking, but now he looked up in an attempt to get back to the kind of conversation they usually had post-injury.

“Did you insult them? That usually doesn’t go down well with criminals.”

“No, they weren’t _offended_ , they knew I wasn’t who I said I was.”

“And you don’t know what tipped them off?”

“I’ve been going over the whole conversation for the last two days and there’s nothing, two of them didn’t even know me and they still figured it out just as quickly as the third one...” Sherlock trailed off, internalising his thought process. Meanwhile John had finished unwrapping his chest and exposed another wound just as nasty as the first one. It looked like the knife hadn’t been deflected from its intended target at all until it had thankfully encountered a rib.

“I’ll need to clean both of those out and stitch them up, but I’d like to wait a bit with that until the painkillers kick in properly. They still won’t do much, but I don’t have anything stronger. Is there anything else I should know about?”

“Hm? Oh, ankle’s probably sprained and there might’ve been a concussion.”

“Might have been? Tell me if any of this hurts.” John had already taken off Sherlock’s shoe so he could asses the supposed sprain, while he continued questioning Sherlock on the possible concussion.

“I accidentally hit my head rather hard on someone else’s nose, completely smashed the nose, god thing I did, it gave me time to – Ow! Anyway I was very dizzy after, but that might’ve been the blood-choke or the first stab wound – Ow! Vision was blurry too and I couldn’t think properly, my head still hurts...”

“Yep, looks like a bad sprain, you’ve been walking on this, haven’t you?”

“Running.”

“What?”

“Not just walking, running too, and climbing fences...”

“Well, you’ll stay off it now, I’ll wrap it up in a second, but first let me see your head.”

Once John had checked over Sherlock’s head and wrapped up his ankle, he turned his attention back to the two deep gashes.

“Do you think you can make it to the bathroom? I don’t have anything to carry water around in.”

“I made it here from Vienna, I think I can handle the bathroom.”

Despite Sherlock’s recovered cockiness John saw how much the short trek had exhausted him once he was settled on the closed toilet lid. Cleaning out the wounds would hurt like hell and John wanted to give him a chance to rest before he started on that, so he took out his thermometer to see how much he’d have to worry about the infected cuts.

“I know how hard that is for you, but try and keep that inside your mouth and your mouth shut for a few minutes”, John joked while he handed Sherlock the thermometer. He counted the small but genuine smile that appeared on Sherlock’s face at that as a personal victory.

Once Sherlock was conveniently shut up, John decided it was time to lecture him on proper care for wounds for a bit, if only to keep himself sane while they waited for the beep.

“Those should have been stitched up right away, they’re going to scar pretty badly now,” Sherlock started to open his mouth, probably to say something in his defence, but the thermometer started to tilt dangerously and he settled for glaring at John instead.

John decided to be generous and make Sherlock’s point for him: “But I guess hospital wasn’t an option, was it?” Sherlock stopped glaring, which John took as a yes.

“So what about Mycroft, couldn’t he have –“ this time the thermometer actually fell out of Sherlock’s mouth, before he managed to limit himself to glaring again.

“I don’t have another one of those in my bag so don’t break it,” John could practically feel the force with which Sherlock wanted to say: ‘That was one time!’ If Sherlock had been allowed to speak, John would have answered that, yes, it was only one time, but that was mostly due to the fact that John knew not to leave him unsupervised with a thermometer in his mouth anymore.

“I know you don’t like to ask your brother for help, but in this case waiting for me to arrive instead of calling him was just stupid! Especially if you can’t even be bothered to change out your bandages.” Thankfully, the thermometer chose that moment to start beeping, before John could start ripping into Sherlock in earnest. He really hadn’t meant to, it was just... John knew how Sherlock tended to treat his body when he was on a case and no one was reminding him to eat and sleep, not that reminding him improved matters much, but... at least John had been there to do so. And now, after half a year of absolutely no contact, after worrying every night, wondering if there was still a point to the charade that had become his life or if tomorrow would be the day that Molly called and told him that Mycroft had called... telling himself night after night that he was being stupid and that Sherlock was clever and that Sherlock had it under control and that Sherlock was being careful (yeah right) and even if Sherlock wasn’t, Mycroft would keep him safe and it would all be all right and now he found Sherlock in his hotel room and seemingly had all his worst fears confirmed. Mycroft couldn’t help when Sherlock wasn’t talking to him and Sherlock wasn’t being careful and the mission wasn’t safe and Sherlock was being an idiot. And now John had to hurt him to heal him and he _didn’t want to_.

As soon as Sherlock was free of the impediment of the thermometer between his lips, he said: “I lost my phone.”

“What?” What did that have to do with anything? If John wasn’t so used to Sherlock’s non-sequiturs he’d be worrying about head injuries again.

“I lost my phone. I couldn’t call Mycroft. The only way of reaching him directly is to call from an authorised number. Either my phone or the landline at the safe-house. I lost my phone in the fight and they know roughly where I was living so they’d have people waiting there for me and I couldn’t go through another phone, because that would be redirected to a minion and I know there’s a mole among them and the first-aid-kit I stole barely had enough bandages for one wrapping and the garden where I got the shirt didn’t have one at all and I didn’t want to climb another fence and maybe I should have gone to Schnell, but I didn’t think that she’d still want to help me after I...” There was more than just a tinge of desperation in Sherlock’s voice towards the end and John felt like the biggest arse in the world for berating him like that.

“Hey Sherlock, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. You did what you could and I should have trusted that. Alright?”

“Alright.” There was almost the beginning of a smile on Sherlock’s face again. John regretted that it would probably be wiped off in less than a minute. John stalled a bit longer by looking on the reading of the thermometer.

“37.8 not too bad, given the state you’re in, but I definitely want you on a broadband antibiotic, especially since I can’t just call an ambulance if it gets worse.” How was he going to get his hands on antibiotics here? However that was a problem for later, for now he should get on with the unpleasant part of medicine.

“Okay, this is going to hurt. Worse than when you first got the wounds. Just tell me to stop if it’s too much, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Just get on with it John!”

* * *

 

When Sherlock was finally settled in bed John breathed a sigh of relief. Cleaning out the wounds had been gruesome. They’d had to stop several times and every time it had taken longer than the last for Sherlock to get his bearings and with every time he’d looked less like he meant it when he’d told John to go on. After he was done with the first one, John had offered Sherlock a longer break, but Sherlock had told him to keep going. When John had tried to insist on a break Sherlock had silently confessed, that he didn’t think he’d have the courage to start again if they stopped now and John had reluctantly continued. By the time John had cleaned, stitched up and rewrapped both gashes, Sherlock had been pale and trembling, eyes not just glassy with pain anymore, but brimming over with tears, his breaths were becoming so rough that they could probably be called sobs and if John never heard that almost suppressed whimper again, it would still be too soon. At Sherlock’s request, John had helped him wash, before lending him his pyjamas. When John had first helped Sherlock limp to the bathroom, Sherlock had only leant on him enough to keep his weight off his ankle, but this time around John practically had to carry him.

Upon reaching the bed, Sherlock had quickly returned to the lump-like-state John had found him in, except that this time he was in the bed instead of under it and therefore had access to both a pillow and a duvet, both of which were being used to their full extent. Now that Sherlock was finally able to rest, John was loath to disturb him again, but there was one more thing that needed to be done. John already had the beginnings of a plan to get his hands on antibiotics, but he needed to know who to trust first.

“Sherlock?”

“Hnng.” Sherlock burrowed deeper into his pillow, he was already half asleep and obviously unwilling to give that up.

“I’m sorry, I’ll leave you alone in a second, I just need to know if anyone is spying on me on the conferences I go to.”

“’s possible...” From the way Sherlock kept his eyes resolutely shut and addressed his pillow instead of him, John guessed that he actually meant ‘Piss of’.

“Sherlock, please just concentrate for a minute and then you can sleep, I promise. The names I posted on the blog, of those I met at more than one conference, you said you’d investigate them. Do they check out?”

Sherlock finally cracked on eye open and answered: “I’d’ve told you if I’d found anything.” the ‘Piss off’ was still implied, but since it came with actual information this time, John didn’t mind much.

“So if I get one of them to prescribe me antibiotics for a fake injury, that’s fine?” John asked for confirmation, but Sherlock’s eye had already drifted closed again and John could only hope that the thing he mumbled into his pillow was supposed to mean: “Mhm, should be.”

“Alright, good, that’s great. I’ll try to be back with your antibiotics before the afternoon lectures. Get some sleep, I’ll put the do-not-disturb-sign on the door.”

John then closed the curtains and put a glass of water on the nightstand, before grabbing some leftover bandages and silently leaving to enact his plan.

* * *

 

Univ. Prof. Dr. med. univ. Manuel Becker was part of the usual crowd at medical conferences, and Dr John Watson MBBS had been too, for the past year now. Therefore they knew each other well enough to have an outline of each other’s life and for Dr. Becker to invite Dr Watson to the conference. Dr Watson knew that Dr. Becker had a wife and a daughter, he also knew that Dr. Becker was a lecturer at the Paracelsus Medical Private University and had helped organise this conference, and he knew that Dr. Becker worked at the University Hospital Salzburg, where the conference was held. In contrast Dr. Becker didn’t know that Dr Watson had a girlfriend (who was a spy and assassin), he also didn’t know that Dr Watson’s best friend had committed suicide a bit over a year ago and he didn’t know that Dr Watson had been Captain Watson at some point nor that he had been shot in the line of duty.

Dr. Becker thought of Dr Watson as a friend. Dr Watson thought of Dr. Becker as an asset.

So when Dr Watson came up to Dr. Becker at the reception, looking a bit sheepish he was quite happy to greet him: “Dr Watson! I’m glad you could make it! Was your flight alright?”

“Yeah the flight was fine, listen I was wondering if you could help me out?”

“I’ll see what I can do, what’s the matter?”

“I was bitten by a dog yesterday and I’ve got a prescription of antibiotics, but, idiot that I am, I forgot them in London,” Dr Watson admitted with a self depreciating grin, “and, well, I thought maybe you could...”

“You want me to prescribe you some more? No problem, when’s your next dose due?”

“Well, I’m supposed to take it with lunch and I really don’t want to take any risks, I’ve had a bad infection a few years ago and I’m not keen on repeating that experience.”

“Alright, no time to lose then,” Dr. Becker checked his watch. “We’ve still got some time until everyone will be heading out for lunch I think, and even if they leave without us, I know where they are going. Let’s just go up to my office, there should be a prescription pad lying around somewhere and you can pick them up at the hospital pharmacy.”

“Thank you, you’re a lifesaver!”

“Aren’t we all here?” Dr. Becker joked, before asking: “So what are you on?”

* * *

 

Lunch was exhausting. John had to force himself to concentrate on the conversation. His mind kept going to the pills in his pocket and, by extension, to the man they were meant for. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake, trusting Dr. Becker and that the ease with which he’d gotten hold of the antibiotics had been due to the doctor’s gullibility not guile. He worried about Sherlock, alone back at the hotel. What if he took a turn for the worse? He didn’t even have a phone to contact John with. John tried to remember if he’d seen a landline in the hotel room, but he just didn’t know. What if room service ignored the sign at the door and walked in on him? Would they know he didn’t belong? Would they call the police? What if someone knew he was there and had just waited for John to leave so they could attack? Oh god, what if John came back and Sherlock was just gone? What would he do then? Sherlock had said that you could only reach Mycroft with an authorised number. Was John’s number authorised? Probably not or Sherlock could have used his phone, but Sherlock had been pretty out of it, what if he just hadn’t thought of that option? What if...?

He wondered how he might be able to sneak away after lunch to check on Sherlock. There should be enough time before the afternoon’s lectures started, he just had to get away from the group without anyone noticing. Or maybe he should think of an excuse? Forgot something at the hotel, just popping over to get it. What? What did you forget? Laptop? No then you’d have to use it to take notes and your typing isn’t fast enough for that. Pen? Notebook? No they’d just offer to lend you something. Wallet? Not being able to pay for lunch would be embarrassing enough to make it seem sincere. But no, you paid for your antibiotics so Dr. Becker might notice. Phone? Not ideal, you don’t really need that for the lectures and you’re not one of those people who can’t live without their phone, but you might be able to pull it off. Maybe make up some friend or distant relative who’s in hospital and you want to be available, being the doctor in the family. You don’t want to make up too many lies though, the more people you lie to the more probable it gets that one of your lies reaches the wrong ears and makes its way to Mary. If you only tell Dr. Becker that might reduce the risk because he already heard one lie so if by design or freak coincidence the lies you told him make their way to Mary it doesn’t really matter how many there are, you’re fucked anyway. Or maybe he wouldn’t have to lie at all (except about the whereabouts of his phone), as Sherlock liked to say, _only lies have detail_ , unprompted detail that was, for a convincing lie you needed to have the details in your head, but only divulge them when asked.

When lunch was finally over John forced himself to stay for an additional five minutes of small talk, before making a show of reaching for his pocket, frowning and trying the other pocket before going for the jacket pocket, then quickly checking all the pockets again and swearing when he found nothing. After making his excuses John made himself walk away unhurriedly instead of breaking into a run. He stopped by a bakery on his way, trying to guess what Sherlock would be willing to eat in his current state. Sherlock wasn’t usually picky about food. He either ate or he didn’t, the kind of food that was available didn’t have much of an influence. John was just worried that this was one of the occasions where he wouldn’t want to eat. There were exceptions of course, things he would eat even when he wouldn’t, usually, but since those were almost exclusively Mrs Hudson’s cooking that knowledge wasn’t much help. In the end John decided that variety was the way to go and ordered a small selection of baked goods in the hope that Sherlock would be tempted by at least one of them.

He needn’t have worried. When he opened the door to his room he was greeted by a Sherlock who looked like he’d been suddenly jerked awake and was now rapidly regretting moving, which, as John soon found out, was exactly what had happened.

“Sorry, did I wake you? I’ll try to be more silent next time.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Be silent. You’ll wake me up anyway, but if you’re loud enough I can recognise your steps.” When they were living together Sherlock had been able to sleep through almost anything as long as he was tired enough. The implications weren’t lost on John. When was the last time Sherlock had felt safe? Probably before he left London.

“Alright, how are you feeling?” John sat down on the edge of the bed, depositing his paper bag from the bakery beside him.

“Like someone tried to kill me and almost succeeded, and I didn’t stop running for two days after.” Sherlock was clearly trying for levity, but his attempt fell a mile short. John decided to go with it anyway. Sherlock clearly didn’t want to talk and right now John didn’t have the time anyway if he didn’t want to be missed at the conference.

“So, shattered then? Like you want to sleep for a week?”

“Hm, maybe longer.”

“Well I’ve only got this room booked until Saturday, so you’ll have to leave the bed at some point, but until then...”

“Well, good night then,” Sherlock demonstratively turned away from John, pulling the duvet up to his nose.

“Hey Sherlock wait, I’ve got your antibiotics!”

Sherlock reluctantly turned back to face John. “And I suppose you’ll want me to eat too,” Sherlock gestured at the bag of baked goods. “Fine, what’s in there?” He didn’t sound overly enthusiastic about eating, it was closer to the cold determination he’d displayed on the topic of cleaning his wounds, but at least he was willing to eat at all.

Sherlock chose a plain bun and at first he barely nibbled on it, but his body seemed to quickly realise how hungry it was and soon John had to remind him to slow down and chew, so he wouldn’t make himself sick.

After watching him take his antibiotics, John left Sherlock with another glass of water, the rest of the food he’d bought and the painkillers with instructions on when to take the next dose on the bedside table, hurrying back to the conference.

* * *

 

After the lectures, of which John remembered absolutely nothing, there was dinner, followed by drinks. Of course there were drinks, there were always drinks. That was the whole point of conferences, they were a networking opportunity. And usually, John was fine with that, but this time all he wanted was to return to his hotel room and check on Sherlock. He’d had the presence of mind to start yawning periodically during dinner, so he could excuse himself, claiming to be asleep on his feet.

This time John didn’t try to be quiet when he approached his room and unlocked the door, but he needn’t have bothered, because Sherlock was already awake and had appropriated John’s laptop. The annoyance at the invasion of his privacy was so familiar it made John smile.

“You never change, do you?”

“Hm.” Sherlock’s hum was the only indication that he’d even noticed John’s presence. John didn’t know if he should be flattered or offended that Sherlock felt safe enough around him to ignore him.

“So what are you working on?” John looked over Sherlock’s shoulder at the laptop, but all the pages Sherlock was rapidly switching between appeared to be in German.

“I’m trying to figure out my mistake,” Sherlock answered without looking up from the screen.

“You mean what gave you away?”

“Yes, I have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” There was a hint of desperation in Sherlock’s voice that John didn’t like at all.

“Any luck?” he tried.

“What does it look like?” Sherlock spat, “It should be obvious, so why can’t I see it?”

“Alright, I’ll leave you to it, shall I?” John beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom, when Sherlock was in this kind of mood it was better to leave him be unless you fancied being called an idiot, or worse. Remembering some of Sherlock’s more creative insults made him smile. Maybe he should just stay and see what Sherlock would come up with, if only to stop being so fucking nostalgic about being insulted on a regular basis. No, the shower beckoned and John had been looking forward to washing the day of travelling and worries off his skin, since his chance at a shower had been thwarted by finding Sherlock in his room.

When John came back to the main room after his shower and brushing his teeth, Sherlock seemed to have given up. John’s laptop was balanced precariously on the nightstand and Sherlock was lying on his back with the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes.

“Headache?”

Sherlock just gave a frustrated huff that John interpreted as ‘Yes but I’m not willing to admit to that weakness.’ He’d probably push himself to work through the night just to prove that he could, unless John did something. Sherlock had been remarkably reasonable earlier, maybe it would be enough to provide him with an excuse for rest.

“Well, I’m knackered, travelling always wears you out more than it should.” John complained while he rooted around for his pyjamas, until he remembered that Sherlock was wearing them. He settled for a spare t-shirt and a pair of fresh pants.

“That’s because you always fly econ-om- Oh!” Sherlock dove for the computer, so much for getting him to rest, “John you’re brilliant! Well not you, me when you’re with me...”, Sherlock continued muttering while he abused John’s laptop.

After about a minute of furious typing and clicking, an exclamation: “Gelse! Ich hätte Gelse sagen sollen, nicht Schnake!” there was some more frantic clicking and typing, before: “Und Brösel statt Krümel. Stupid, stupid, stupid!“

“Sorry, the only thing I got from that was ‘stupid’. Did you figure it out?” John hoped he had. If there wasn’t a puzzle to solve anymore, Sherlock was far more reasonable about things like eating or sleeping.

“There are small linguistic differences that go beyond accent even in relatively small, completely connected language regions.”

“Alright, and...?” Did that mean that he’d figured it out? What could linguistics possibly have to do with Sherlock’s mission?

“I learned German from one of mummy’s friends, when I was still very little, which is a good thing since I wouldn’t be able to pronounce Ö and Ü believably otherwise. She was from Germany so I obviously had to adopt a different accent when I was undercover in Vienna, but accents are easy, they’re just some phonetic changes that are pretty consistent over all the words, where it gets tricky is vocabulary and word use, because there are no general rules for that. Some words just have a different meaning or are only used in certain regions.”

“So what, you used a word wrong?”

“Exactly, I said Schnake where I should have said Gelse and earlier on I said Krümel instead of Brösel, but that didn’t garner that much of a reaction, just some weird looks. Maybe because that’s a more common word that’s spread easier by the media...”

“And they noticed that? Two words and they immediately knew you were a spy?” John remembered Baskerville and Frankland’s _cellphone_. Sherlock had noticed that, but John? The average (stupid) mind? Not a chance. And shouldn’t it matter even less when the countries weren’t separated by an ocean? How had some common criminals figured that one out?

“Apparently Austrians are rather territorial about their language. Probably some kind of inferiority complex...” Sherlock had returned the laptop to its precarious perch on the bedside table and was back on his back, this time with an arm thrown over his face. Yes, sleep for him.

“Alright, great, you’ve figured it out. Have you taken your antibiotics?”

“Is that really necessary, I feel fine, John.” From the part of his face that wasn’t obscured by his arm John could tell that he was only arguing for the sake of the argument.

“Well, let’s keep it that way. Take your medicine, Sherlock and just be glad that I know you got a tetanus booster last year.”

Once Sherlock had swallowed his pill, John coerced him into letting him change the bandages. He was starting to run a bit low on them, there were still enough for one more change, but he’d have to buy some more tomorrow. At least the gashes didn’t look quite as horrible as the last time he’d seen them. Sherlock’s fever hadn’t risen either, which relieved John to no end.

“Alright, budge up,” John ordered, after he was done. The bed was a rather wide single, not really big enough for two grown men to share, but there wasn’t even an extra blanket, so John wasn’t exactly keen on taking the floor and he sure as hell wasn’t going to kick Sherlock out either, so sharing it was. In any case Sherlock didn’t complain, just moved further to the edge to make room for John. However, once John had climbed in and was about to turn off the light, Sherlock spoke up again, almost to himself he murmured: “People will talk...”

John snorted. Then after thinking for a moment he laughed again, a bit more hysterical this time. At Sherlock’s questioning look he explained: “My girlfriend would literally kill me if she knew,” which had both of them giggling this time.

John couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Sherlock laugh like that, genuine and carefree. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he himself had laughed like that, and by the slightly startled look on Sherlock’s face he couldn’t either. That’s when the seriousness of the situation finally hit properly. Up until then John had mostly been concerned about ensuring Sherlock’s continued survival. He hadn’t let himself dwell on what could have happened, but Sherlock could have easily died. If he’d been a little slower, a little weaker, a little less lucky... they might never have laughed like that again.

Sherlock picked up on his sudden graveness and enquired: “John? What is it?”

“God Sherlock, I’m so glad you made it out of there alive!” John whispered harshly. Somehow that made Sherlock smile again.

“Me too,” he whispered back.

* * *

 

When John woke up the next morning, about half an hour before the alarm he’d set, Sherlock was still asleep, so he quickly cancelled the alarm so it wouldn’t wake Sherlock, while he was downstairs getting breakfast. However, getting out of bed proved harder than anticipated, since at some point during the night Sherlock had grabbed a hold of John’s shirt and was now holding on to it with a stronger grip than John thought a sleeping man could have.

Sherlock woke up, startled, when John tried to extricate his shirt from his vice grip.

“John?!” There was a light tremor in his voice and he transferred his grip from John’s shirt to his hand.

“Shh, it’s alright, I’m just going downstairs to get breakfast, go back to sleep Sherlock, I’ll be back before you know it,” John tried to calm him down, but it seemed like John’s attempted departure had woken Sherlock up for good and the pain from the sudden movement had done the rest.

“Alright, painkillers for you. There’s still some bread left over from yesterday, have that with the pills and I’ll bring you some proper breakfast from downstairs.”

* * *

 

The second day of the conference was far less stressful than the first. After smuggling enough of the breakfast buffet upstairs to last both of them, John had redressed Sherlock’s wounds once more, noting the improvement over the previous evening. Sherlock’s fever had disappeared over night too, giving John one less reason to worry.

He still wasn’t paying a lot of attention in the lectures, his mind going back to Sherlock after a few minutes, every time he tried to concentrate on the subject matter. If they were in London, Sherlock would be getting bored right about now. Unable to leave the room, only John’s laptop and his own mind as company, John wouldn’t be surprised to find some kind of makeshift experiment on hotel soap underway when he got back. He just hoped Sherlock would leave his first aid kit alone.

John decided the risk of slipping away during lunch was too great, considering that Sherlock was clearly getting better and could even contact John via e-mail since John had his phone and Sherlock had John’s laptop and the hotel-wifi.

As if on command, John’s mobile vibrated in his pocket, but it wasn’t Sherlock. It was Mary. Shit! John had never been this scared to open a text. Did she know? Don’t panic, why would she text you, warn you, if she knew?

 _Is everything alright?_  
I thought you were  
going to call me last  
night. x 

Oh thank god! He’d just forgotten to check in.

 _Sorry! I was completely_  
exhausted, I just fell  
straight into bed. I think  
I even forgot to brush  
my teeth. Call you  
tonight. x 

Apart from that scare, lunch and the afternoon lectures flew by without leaving an impression. John managed to get out of dinner this time though. They didn’t have a reservation this time so they split up and John simply told each group that he was thinking about going with someone else and instead got some takeaway on the way back to the hotel.

* * *

 

_“Love you”_

“Love you too, good night.”

_“Good night.”_

John ended the call to find Sherlock staring at him.

“What?” he demanded. It was already stressful enough to keep up his act, he didn’t need Sherlock dissecting it and pointing out all his flaws.

“John, I know you like danger, but did you have to fall in love with her?” Sherlock drawled. What? John wasn’t...

“Sherlock, you do realise that this is an act, right? She started saying that a few weeks ago and it would be kind of awkward if I didn’t say it back.”

“Yes, but she’s only acting, while you mean it.”

“Great, so apparently my acting can fool Sherlock Holmes, because I am Not In Love With MARY!”

“Yes you are.”

“Believe me I’m really not,” John cut the argument short by disappearing in the bathroom and turning on the shower.

Sherlock had it wrong. John was most definitely not in love with Mary. Sure she was good to talk to, now that he’d learned to relax a bit around her and she was pretty enough that it wasn’t exactly a hardship to pretend with her, but he was very aware of what she was and the utter disaster falling in love with her would be. So no, he wasn’t in love with her. He might have been by now if he didn’t know who she really was, but he did know. Except he didn’t really, he didn’t know how much about her was false. Certainly the in-love-with-John-Watson-part, probably most of her backstory, though it was possible, likely even that she really was an orphan, her nursing credentials might be fake but the skills were real, her personality, he wasn’t so sure about. By now he knew from experience how difficult it was to keep up a facade day in day out, certainly it was easier to just lie about as little as possible. Unless of course she was a far superior actor than John and putting on a new personality was like putting on new clothes for her. But he wasn’t falling for her.

Thankfully Sherlock let the topic go, when John emerged from his shower.

* * *

 

John was almost asleep when Sherlock’s voice woke him up again.

“John? Are you awake?” He sounded unsure, almost as if he half-hoped that John really was asleep already. Which of course meant that John was wide awake in under a second.

“Well now I am. You alright?” John asked, turning towards Sherlock. It was too dark to make out more than the silhouette of Sherlock facing him. He already knew the answer to his question couldn’t be a resounding ’yes’ from the way Sherlock had started the conversation. He was never that insecure unless something was wrong. Usually something to do with feelings, something Sherlock didn’t think should be wrong, didn’t think was allowed to be wrong, at least not with him. John briefly thought about turning on the bedside light, but decided against it, assuming that Sherlock would be more comfortable if John couldn’t see his face during this conversation.

“Fine,” he claimed. Yeah, John wasn’t buying that, but pushing Sherlock wouldn’t help, so John just waited, until: “I was just wondering...” Alright, more stalling, but at least he was still talking. “How do you do it John?” The last bit was almost too silent for John to hear, but the direct question was his cue to carefully prod: “Do what?”

Silence.

Followed by an almost meek: “Kill someone.”

Shit. John hadn’t expected that. He didn’t know why. He knew that Sherlock’s mission was dangerous. Dangerous enough that killing someone might become the recommended course of action. Maybe he hadn’t fully realised that. Or maybe he just hadn’t thought that Sherlock would have a problem with that.

“Um, I’m guessing you’re not talking about the mechanical aspect?”

More silence.

“And that this isn’t a hypothetical question?”

Again silence.

It didn’t look like Sherlock was going to offer up any further information on his own.

“What happened, Sherlock?”

Even more silence.

“The people who attacked you, did you kill them?”

Once more: Silence.

“Or did you fail to do so and that’s why you got hurt?”

Finally a whisper in the dark: “I killed them.”

“Good.”

“Good?” It didn’t sound like Sherlock believed him. Well, if he needed the _‘I’m glad you’re not dead’_ spelled out again...

“If that’s what you had to do to get out of there alive, then hell yeah I’m glad you killed them!”

“Really? You’re not... concerned?” Alright that might have come out a bit too intense. John hadn’t intended to sound like Sherlock’s distress didn’t matter.

“Of course I’m concerned, you’re clearly upset about it, so of course I’m concerned about you,” he was quick to reassure Sherlock, but apparently that wasn’t the right thing to say either.

“I... didn’t mean... about me.” Wait what? John had a feeling that they were talking about completely different things, but what else could Sherlock mean?

“What else should I be concerned about?”

He was answered by even more silence, but John decided to wait it out this time, mostly because he had no idea what to say next. His waiting was rewarded, when Sherlock finally whispered: “I’m a murderer, John.” Where the hell had that come from? Was Sherlock talking about legal consequences? Which wouldn’t make sense, even if Sherlock wasn’t officially dead.

“Yeah, no. You’re not.”

“But I –“

“Sherlock, killing someone in self defence is not murder. I thought you were familiar with that part of the legal system?” John tried to lighten the mood a bit, which turned out to be a mistake.

The silence was back.

John decided to try a different approach.

“Sherlock, you’re no more of a murderer than I am.”

Another bout of silence.

“Our first case, Jefferson Hope?” John pressed on, which finally got a frustrated “That’s different!” from Sherlock. Which didn’t actually clear up anything, except that Sherlock was holding them to different standards.

“How? Sherlock, why is it different when I do it?”

John was expecting the silence to rear its head again, as it was wont to do when he asked direct questions, but this time Sherlock answered: “You’re... you. You’re good,” not that that was overly helpful. John felt like every word out of Sherlock’s mouth only served to confuse him more.

“What?”

“You... care about people.”

“So what? That’s what enables me to commit justifiable homicide instead of murder?” Nope, that didn’t make any more sense when he said it out loud, than it had in his head.

And there was the silence again.

Well, if Sherlock wasn’t going to answer, John might as well address the part that Sherlock hadn’t said out loud.

“And don’t pretend you don’t care about anyone. You might not care a lot about strangers, but the people you know? You threw a man out of the window, because he laid a hand on Mrs Hudson.”

“You’ve used that argument before.” Maybe John should have gone for ‘You left everything you love behind to save your friends’ instead?

“Yes but we were both acting then. And you’re sidetracking.” If Sherlock didn’t actually want to talk, why did he start this conversation? John knew that wasn’t exactly fair, but it was long past midnight, he was tired and he wasn’t good at this stuff either.

“Leave it John, you don’t understand.” Apparently Sherlock had come to the same conclusion, because he turned over onto his back. John couldn’t tell if he had closed his eyes or if he was staring into the darkness. John sighed. He was far too tired for this conversation, but he couldn’t just leave Sherlock alone with his thoughts like that either.

“No I don’t, because you never bloody explain anything,” he complained.

“No, the only reason you don’t understand is because you still, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe that I’m a good person!” Sherlock hissed, turning back towards John, eyes flashing in the dark.

“Oh,” John breathed, well that explained a whole lot. Now how should he go about disabusing Sherlock of those notions? The direct approach couldn’t work, because while it might help to have someone believe in him, Sherlock would just accuse him of hero worship. No he’d have to let him figure it out for himself, lay out the evidence and hope Sherlock came to the right conclusion.

“Alright, let me get this straight: They chased you, they attacked you, you fought back, they hurt you and you killed them. You said you were surprised at being found out, you didn’t even know what your mistake was, so I assume you didn’t plan that outcome.”

John didn’t expect a response. He gave Sherlock just enough time to contradict him before he continued talking: “Which makes it a very clear cut case of self defence.”

“You’ve already been over this, what’s your point?”

John had hoped to build his case slowly, making sure that he was on the right trail, that he hadn’t completely misinterpreted this, which was always a possibility with Sherlock. However Sherlock seemed to be out of patience, so John got straight to the point: “Did you enjoy it?”

John already knew the answer, at least he hoped he did. He was counting on what he’d gleaned from the very beginning of their conversation, Sherlock’s _‘How do you do it, John’_ , taking it to mean _‘How do you kill someone and are fine after’_.

Please don’t let me be wrong about this.

Sherlock took his time answering. The silence stretched almost long enough for John to ask again. He might have if he hadn’t been just a little bit afraid of the answer. However, he was relieved of that decision by Sherlock’s whispered: “No.”

“Didn’t think so. So do you want to explain how any of this makes you a bad person?”

John had expected the silence this time, as the question hadn’t been designed to get a reply. It was enough if Sherlock tried to form one and failed to make it sound logical even in his own head.

“Who put that thought in your head, Sherlock? Who made you believe that you are inherently evil?” John hadn’t really meant to voice that thought, it had just slipped out to fill the silence. Letting it had been a mistake, judging from the way Sherlock tensed and his breathing turned just a little bit harsher. John had no idea how to fix it.

The best he could come up with after a while was a hesitant: “Sherlock?”

“If everything is just perfectly fine and there’s nothing wrong with me then why doesn’t it stop?” Sherlock snarled. At least John had succeeded in snapping him out of his thoughts, even if he’d made him angry. John would take anger over brooding any day, but especially in this situation, because an angry Sherlock was a talking Sherlock. “Why can’t I just... This is utterly hateful!”

“You think it shouldn’t affect you, because you were in the right? I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works, Sherlock,” John tried to soothe him.

“But you shot the cabby and you were fine, because, and I quote, _he wasn’t a very nice man!_ ” Sherlock sounded so confused, and frustrated at his confusion.

“God, did I really say that? Look, Sherlock that wasn’t the first time I killed someone. It gets easier to deal with, with time.”

“What was the first?” The question was more tentative than John had thought Sherlock was capable of being, when demanding information. If it hadn’t been for that hesitation, if he’d asked with his normal focused curiosity and intent to pick him apart, John might have told him it was none of his business. He really, really didn’t want to talk about that one, but if his perspective might help Sherlock get through this, how could he refuse?

“The army,” John could practically feel Sherlock’s eye roll so he added: “Obviously,” before continuing: “I was bored on the base,” there was a slightly louder breath, almost a snort in the darkness and John couldn’t help the silent chuckle: “Yes I managed to get bored in a war zone. It was always days of inactivity and bureaucracy, interspersed by hours of frantic activity, when new patients were brought in. Anyway, it was day three of boredom and they were short on medics, so I volunteered. It wasn’t the first time I had. Nothing was supposed to happen, I was just escorting a convoy with patients from another camp back to base. None of them were in critical condition, so no use wasting a chopper, since the road was supposed to be safe. We were ambushed, I was told to stay with the injured, while the others engaged the enemy. Two of them managed to get through, I shot them. Didn’t sleep for two days. Three weeks later I volunteered again.”

Silence greeted John when he stopped talking, but he wasn’t bothered by it, he just waited it out.

“So, time? That’s your brilliant solution?” Sherlock scoffed eventually.

“That and everyone telling me how impressive that was _for a doctor._ Couldn’t destroy their illusion by breaking down. Professional pride, you know.” Just deal with it, that’s your great advice? God he wasn’t equipped to deal with this. “I’m sorry, I’m not being very helpful am I?” John admitted.

“You’re doing fine.”

“Do you want to...” John trailed off, _talk about it_ probably wouldn’t go over well, “I don’t know...” how to paraphrase, “tell me what happened?”

“Not particularly... Would that... help?”

“It might... Usually didn’t do much good for me, but everyone is different in that regard.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I’m here, okay.”

“Good night John.” Sherlock turned over so he was facing away from John. Well that was one way of ending a conversation.

John went back to trying to fall asleep. Just before he dropped off there was a whispered: “Thank you,” in the dark. He must have done something right then.

* * *

 

“I need your help,” Sherlock announced the moment John opened the door to their room, arms full of their breakfast.

“If I wasn’t a month away from moving in with an assassin I’d want a recording of that.” John grinned, while setting his load down on the small table in the corner, before asking: “What for?”

“I have to get the last bits of information to my contact in Vienna,” Sherlock answered, limping over to the table and claiming the only chair. That sounded like the worst idea ever. John knew that Sherlock was getting bored, no wonder, being confined to a single room after the constant travel and stimulation of the last year, but while he’d improved significantly from the lump John had found under his bed two days ago, he was in no condition to return to the field yet.

John decided to try and talk Sherlock out of doing something stupid, but he knew that if Sherlock was planning on putting himself in danger again, there was nothing he could do or say to stop him. In lieu of another chair he perched himself on the table so he was eye to eye with Sherlock and tried: “Sherlock you’re still injured, you really shouldn’t –“

“I know!” Sherlock interrupted John’s carefully constructed argument, voice ripe with frustration. “I’ve already had to reschedule the next three months to account for that, but this needs to be done now! They know someone is after them, so they’ll change things as soon as they can. In a few weeks all the information I’ve gathered will be useless and I won’t be able to get back in again for obvious reasons. I can’t even show my face in Vienna, because by now every criminal there will know my face. I got in deep enough that they’ll probably still be on the lookout for me in a month.” That actually sounded reasonable. John was surprised that Sherlock had agreed with him so readily, usually he would at least have argued for the sake of the argument even when he knew that John would win. Maybe he’d been wrong when he’d assumed that Sherlock wasn’t being careful, maybe Sherlock was better at looking after himself than John gave him credit for.

“Okay so what’s your plan? I’m not saying I approve, but...” John trailed off, the food on the table now claiming some of his attention.

“The conference ends tomorrow,” Sherlock was looking at him with that expectant look that meant he was supposed to glean something from the odd non-sequitur. Quite possibly he was even supposed to guess the whole plan.

“Yes.” Another hint please?

“But you’re not returning to London until Saturday.” This time the look came with a frustrated eye roll. John didn’t think it was what Sherlock wanted to hear, but he decided to explain his reasoning behind that dichotomy anyway.

“Yeah, I always stay a bit longer, just in case something like this happens. I’m telling everyone that if I’m already here I might as well get some sightseeing in.”

“Perfect, so you’ve got time on Friday.” The look was starting to be almost pleading, as if Sherlock wanted to say: ‘Please John prove to me that you’re not a complete moron.’ Thankfully the last bit was enough to clear the fog.

“Oh, you want me to go?” The small smile he got for working it out might have been a tad patronising, but it was genuine.

“It’s the only way. I can’t leave an electronic trace, especially not from your laptop and I can’t go myself for obvious reasons.” Well it looked like he was going on a little side trip to Vienna. Time to get into the details.

“Alright, so your contact, where do I find them and how will they know to trust me?”

“She’s with the police, I’ll draw you up a floor plan to her office. She’ll probably recognise you, no need for dramatics.”

“She knows who you are?” Why else would someone recognize John Watson if not because they knew Sherlock Holmes? “Is she one of Mycroft’s?”

“No, I picked her because she’s clever, according to her solve rate and has a bit more freedom than your average Inspector. She’s perceptive and apparently your blog has a more international readership than you knew.” Oh shit, that wasn’t good, was it? Sherlock’s whole mission depended on no one recognizing him, so how could he treat this so cavalierly? He seemed almost impressed with that woman.

“She recognised you? Are you sure you can trust her? After all you’re still a fraud to the official channels,” John reminded him. Despite Greg’s best efforts and apparently Anderson’s too, if what Greg had told him the last time they’d met was true, Sherlock’s name was remaining stubbornly uncleared.

“Oh she didn’t just recognize me, she also did what New Scotland Yard is still struggling with, she worked out that I couldn’t possibly be guilty of everything they accused me of and came to the conclusion that if some of that were lies the rest probably isn’t that trustworthy either.” Yes definitely impressed. And if Sherlock was, John should probably be too.

“Wow, maybe I should put her in contact with Greg,” John joked, taking a bite of his bread. He wasn’t seriously considering the idea, since that would mean Greg finding out about Sherlock, but the man had been extremely frustrated at the whole Yard the last time they’d talked, almost three months ago now. It might do him some good to talk to someone who’d believe him who wasn’t involved in the whole mess.

“Who?” Sherlock asked, looking up from his own breakfast. John was momentarily confused who he was talking about, until he remembered Baskerville.

“Lestrade, Sherlock!” John sighed. Sometimes it was slightly worrying what Sherlock considered important information and what got ‘deleted’.

“Oh right.” Sherlock still sounded sceptical. As if it was complete news to him that Lestrade even had a first name. It made John laugh.

“God I wish I could tell him about this!” He chuckled, “Sherlock, you jumped off a building to save his life, but you can’t be bothered to remember the man’s first name!”

“Why would you want to tell him that?” Sherlock didn’t appreciate the humour in the situation, in fact he seemed a little confused. “Isn’t that the kind of thing that’s...”

“Usually considered rude?” John decided to help him out. “Yeah, but we both know you, you don’t do polite, and well it can be kind of funny sometimes.” Sherlock still looked doubtful. “Forget it, it’s just one of those things we used to talk about.” And that was now awkward and full of guilt for John.

“And you can’t do that anymore? Obviously not with this conversation, but about me in general? Isn’t that one of those things people do, reminisce?”

“No we can’t, not when I know you’re alive and he doesn’t. I already feel like an arse every time we meet, because I’m lying to him, no need to make it worse with talking about you and seeing...” They were talking about Sherlock every single time they met, though. It was usually Greg who brought him up, telling John how the investigation is going. John never had to fake the conflicting emotions those conversations stirred up. Greg would interpret them wrong and change the topic at some point. The rest of the evening was usually more fun. “He’s still trying to clear your name you know? That’s not doing him any favours with his superiors. He’s been warned off three times, that he told me about, but I always tried to get him to back off when he did so he probably just stopped telling me about it after a while.” Sherlock had stopped eating and started to look pensive, while John had been talking. When Sherlock didn’t resurface from his thoughts after a while, John ventured a tentative: “Sherlock?”

Thankfully Sherlock wasn’t too deep in thought for John’s voice to reach him and he seemingly shook off whatever he was thinking about and tucked into his breakfast with more relish than John had ever seen from him during a case, though the frown remained and he kept shooting John assessing looks throughout the rest of their meal, while John filled the silence with a more detailed report about how Greg was faring, trying to amuse Sherlock by telling him how Anderson had done a complete 180 in his opinion about Sherlock after properly examining a few of his cases.

When they were done eating Sherlock’s assessing looks seemed to have brought him to a conclusion: “This is affecting your life,” he stated.

“What?”

“This ruse. It’s affecting you, even beyond Mary. It’s affecting your relationships,” Sherlock explained.

“Of course it is, what did you think?” Leave it to Sherlock to completely miss the interpersonal implications of living a lie.

“I don’t... Oh! Mrs Hudson’s comments on your blog! I thought she was just casually inviting you over, but... When was the last time you saw her, John?” Sherlock asked, apparently shocked by his latest deduction.

“My birthday, I think,” John admitted. Had it really been that long?

“But that was months ago! You were supposed to keep an eye on her!” Sherlock exclaimed.

“Your brother is doing that,” John reminded him even though he knew it wouldn’t placate Sherlock.

“But don’t you care –“ Alright enough was enough!

“Sherlock, you have no right to accuse me of abandoning Mrs Hudson, when you’re the one who left!” he interrupted Sherlock. “You have no idea what it is like, lying to everyone you know and watching them suffer because of it. Every time I see them I know two words from me could fix it, but I can’t say them and that’s not even the worst part, because _they_ are all worried about _me_ when I’m the one they really don’t need to worry about, because I’m the bastard who knows everything and isn’t telling them! Do I feel guilty about abandoning her? Hell yes, but it would be so much worse to come around for tea every week and have her fuss over me and try to talk about you and know... And then there’s Mary of course. If I visited more often, Mrs Hudson would want to meet my girlfriend and if Mary knew her, that would give her access, in case she gets her order to kill us and... Believe me, I’ve turned this over so many times...” John trailed off bitterly.

“I... I didn’t consider those ramifications. It was an oversight on my part.” Wow, that was almost an apology, even by normal standards. By Sherlock-standards it most definitely was one.

“It’s alright, I just needed to get that off my chest. It’s not like I can talk to anyone at home,” John accepted the non-apology, before heading to the bathroom to get ready for the day.

The second he stepped out again, Sherlock started talking: “You said you were moving in with Mary, I thought we’d agreed that you should postpone that for another five months at least,” he criticised.

“I know, didn’t work out that way though,” John shrugged. Nothing about his relationship with Mary had ever gone to plan, starting with the fact that there even was a relationship.

“Why?” came the question.

“Aren’t you reading my blog anymore?” John’s tone was teasing, but the question was serious and had fear running through his body. The progress of his relationship with Mary was mapped out there and he’d been trusting that Sherlock was following it, ready to intervene in case things got out of hand, but if he wasn’t reading it, how could John contact him if something truly horrible happened?

“I was deeply undercover for the last two weeks, hardly the best time to check on you. So enlighten me,” Sherlock demanded. There was a hint of steel in his voice that practically screamed _explain yourself!_ John hurried to comply, though he didn’t really understand why Sherlock was so keen on blaming him for the situation, he’d done everything the git asked of him, completely gave up on his free will and now he was being held accountable for the outcome.

“She’s bloody stubborn, she’s worse than you,” he complained. “She just kept bringing it up until I had to relent.” Sherlock seemed singularly unimpressed by his excuse, so John continued: “She had too many good reasons for it and I didn’t have enough against it. She said she’d been thinking about buying something instead of renting for a while now and she recently got quite a bit of money from her parents that’s been caught up in legal disputes. I know that’s not where she really got it, but the money is there. So she was going to invest it anyway and if she has a house that’s easily big enough for two, what’s the point in me paying rent? And then there’s the fact that I can’t fake nightmares when she’s in my bed so she surmised that I sleep better when she’s there. I gave in when she started to rope other people into it. I might’ve been able to push it for another month or two, but unless you’re almost done on your end I don’t see what good it would’ve done, apart from antagonising her,” John finished with his best justification. He had no idea what Mary would do if she wasn’t satisfied with the progress of their relationship and the amount of information it provided her with and he really wasn’t keen on finding out.

“She’s not going to kill you because she’s angry at you, John!” Sherlock exclaimed, clearly frustrated. “That woman is a professional and she has orders. She won’t go against them, no matter what you do or don’t do.”

“Well since I’m the one living with the assassin, that’s my call and I’m not taking that risk,” was John’s heated reply. For a second it looked like Sherlock might shout back, but then he seemed to deflate and just looked worried instead.

“Risk evaluation? Are you sure that was your reasoning? Not just your justification?” Sherlock carefully prodded. “If she’s already asking you to move in with her, the whole relationship must have been moving far too fast and I don’t know how that could have happened if you didn’t let it.” Sherlock was making a valiant effort not to sound accusing this time, instead going for _please prove me wrong._

“God you aren’t still on about that?” John groaned. “Sherlock I told you, I’m not in love with her. Believe me, I’d tell you if I was, because I’d be panicking.” Understatement of the century, the thought alone made him break out in a cold sweat. “She’s just really good at manipulating people and I fell for it a few times, got talked in a corner with no way out but forward,” John shrugged, “that’s why the whole thing progressed that fast. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” If only he was as sure about that as he was claiming to be. He might not be in love with that woman but her ability to get what she wanted out of him, scared him like nothing else. Maybe he should tell Sherlock about that instead of putting on a brave face.

“I do trust you, I wouldn’t have let you in on my plan if I didn’t,” Sherlock emphasised, but he didn’t lose the worried expression. “Just... be careful. Don’t let her mess with your head. If I’m right about her original identity, she’s CIA-trained and incredibly good at what she’s doing.” Yeah, if Sherlock was genuinely worried about Mary, he probably deserved to know.

“I noticed that. If I didn’t know... I’d have fallen for her months ago,” he confessed. “Sometimes it’s probably too easy to pretend. I don’t know, but if I didn’t like her personality that would make it easier to stay detached, but on the other hand it would also make acting so much harder and I don’t know if I could do it, I just...” John trailed off, not knowing how to put his conflicting thoughts into words.

“John, if you didn’t like her personality, she would be doing something wrong,” Sherlock jumped in, explaining calmly and reassuringly. “You’re meant to like her, I told you she’s highly trained. As long as you know that it is all fake, you’ll be fine.” Sherlock looked at John expectantly.

“I know that,” John insisted.

But did he really?

* * *

 

After that conversation John had to hurry, so he wouldn’t be late to the morning lectures. Not that he was paying any attention to them, he was far too preoccupied turning Sherlock’s words over in his head. He wasn’t in love with Mary, he was sure of that. If Sherlock offered to have her arrested right this instant, he wouldn’t lose sleep over it, no he’d be relieved beyond measure. But he couldn’t shake the thought that he didn’t truly _know_ that it was all fake.

This time John stayed for dinner and went to have drinks with his colleagues afterwards. There were enough leftovers from last nights takeaway in the mini-fridge to last Sherlock the day and John thought it might be too conspicuous to disappear two evenings in a row. That and he felt he just needed to unwind for one night after the morning’s conversation. He didn’t actually drink of course. He hadn’t had more than one pint a night since Sherlock had left London.

When he got back to their room, Sherlock had fallen asleep, slumped sideways from where he’d been leaning back against the headboard, John’s laptop still on and in his lap. John turned it off after saving the open documents, carefully pulled the duvet out from under Sherlock and made sure he shifted into a more comfortable position. If Sherlock was exhausted enough to sleep through that treatment, he probably hadn’t slept at all after their conversation last night. Damn. John had been so caught up in his own problems that he’d forgotten about that. Sherlock had probably tried to wait up for him, trying to keep himself awake with work. John shouldn’t have gone out for drinks. How had everything become so fucked up?

* * *

 

John was woken up by someone muttering in his ear. It was still dark, no sign of the dawn yet, and it took a while for John to classify the oddly soothing voice in his ear. Before his brain got online enough to identify the voice, there was a distant thought that he should probably be alarmed, but his subconscious radiated calm and home, and once he managed to put a name to the voice the errant thought vanished altogether. Sherlock. John was relaxing back into the pillow, quickly falling back asleep to Sherlock’s rumbling monologue, when the meaning of the words suddenly registered.

“...no...”

“...please...”

“...nonononono don’t...”

“...didn’t do it...”

“...stop it...”

“...help...”

He was instantly awake again.

John could only make out about every third word, but it was enough to figure out what was happening. Sherlock was having a nightmare. Well, John had experience dealing with those, though usually from the other end.

“Sherlock.” Calm, strong voice aiming to wake up without startling.

Nothing.

John tried a few more times, but Sherlock seemed to be too deep in his dream to be woken up easily. All it seemed to accomplish was adding John to the dream.

“...what are...”

“...John...”

“...no...”

“...let him...”

“...no please...”

It seemed like a change in tactics was in order.

If John’s appearance in his dream was any indication, Sherlock did notice what went on around him so John decided to try and soothe him out of his nightmare.

“Hey Sherlock it’s alright, you’re fine, you’re safe...” and so on. Sherlock seemed to be of a different opinion though:

“...stay away...”

“...John stop...”

“...watch out...”

“...nononono...”

“...don’t go...”

When it became clear that this wasn’t working either, John risked reaching out for Sherlock. He kept up the stream of reassurances, was careful to stay clear of Sherlock’s injuries and hoped his touch would be processed as friendly.

If John hadn’t been watching for a reaction, he would have missed how Sherlock leaned into his hand, the movement was so minute. He started gently stroking Sherlock’s arm, all the while careful not to get too close to the bandaged gash.

“It’s okay, I’m here, don’t be scared, you’re safe here, I’m not leaving, it’s just a dream...”

Over the course of the next few minutes, the muttering changed into something more pleasant and Sherlock gradually shifted closer to John until his face was mashed into John’s chest. It was kind of adorable really, especially because he didn’t stop talking in his sleep.

“...’s not the gardener...”

“...idiots...”

“...the butler...”

“...wrong...”

“...has t’ be...”

“...John...”

John put an arm around the ridiculous man and pulled him closer.

* * *

 

John used the train ride to Vienna to go through the information Sherlock had provided him with. When John had come back from the last lecture the previous afternoon, Sherlock had given him the flash drive with the intelligence he’d gone through so much trouble to acquire and everything else he needed to make a safe delivery from floor plans to train schedules to the best times for not being seen. Once he arrived, he took the tube to the police headquarters, where the office of his contact was located. When a bunch of officers left for their lunch break, he ducked into a side entrance avoiding having to give his name at the reception.

When he reached the right floor John ran into a young blonde woman. He tried to look like he was supposed to be here and knew what he was doing, but apparently he wasn’t doing a good enough job, because instead of just nodding at him and moving on, she started talking in rapid German, not that slow German would have made a difference: “Grüß Gott, kann ich Ihnen helfen? Wollen Sie zur Chefin?”

Damn! Hoping he wasn’t making a huge mistake he replied: “I’m supposed to meet Sonderinspektorin Schnell...”

“It’s the last office to the right, but I didn’t think she was expecting someone... Never mind, the last few days have been crazy. Sorry I’m in a hurry, bye!” and with that she rushed down the stairs. Well, at least she had been stressed enough that it was unlikely she would remember him.

John made his way to the indicated office. Through the glass wall he could see two people inside. A sharply dressed woman, presumably his contact, was sitting behind the desk. She was showing something on her computer to a man with thinning hair and less professional attire, who was leaning over her shoulder. He was probably part of her team. His presence wasn’t ideal, but Sherlock had said that since her team would see the information anyway, it would be alright as long as he didn’t recognise John and even that probably wouldn’t be a catastrophe.

So John took a deep breath and entered, causing them to look up from the screen.

“Mrs Schnell?” The woman nodded. “I’m just here to deliver this,” John said, pulling the flash drive from his pocket and putting it down on the desk. “It’s the last one,” he added on his way out. Less conversation, less risk, as Sherlock had pointed out.

However, before he could leave the office, Schnell called after him: “Is he alright?”

Once John had turned around, she added: “It’s just... I expected this sooner and last weekend we found two bodies I recognised from his files and I was worried...”

“He’s fine, he already left the country,” John lied. Sherlock had been worried that for all that she knew he was innocent and approved of his mission, Schnell might balk at letting him go free without an investigation if she connected the killings to him. So making her believe that he was already out of her reach, seemed like a good idea.

“Good. For what it’s worth, I’m glad he told you.” So she did know who he was, even though she hadn’t shown any sign of recognition before, which probably meant that her partner didn’t know.

“Me too.”

* * *

 

“So what are you going to do now?” John asked while he finished his packing. Sherlock was in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches on his disguise. They both had to leave in a few minutes, John for the airport and Sherlock... wherever he was going.

Sherlock stepped out of the bathroom, his hair had been dyed grey by applying copious amounts of dry-shampoo John had bought him and he’d subtly changed his facial features to make him look older and just different with the make-up he’d ‘borrowed’ from the woman next door. It was eerie how different he looked. “I’ll take a train to Munich, I can get a fake passport there, fly to London, camp out at Molly’s until I find a way to contact Mycroft without going through his minions...” he answered.

“Wait, Molly’s, I thought you didn’t want to draw attention to her? That’s the only reason why I’m dating Mary!” If Sherlock hadn’t vetoed that plan John’s life would be so much easier.

“There’s a reason her boyfriend looks like me, John,” Sherlock smirked. Wow, John knew that Sherlock had practically ordered Molly to get a boyfriend and had meddled far too much, but that really wasn’t on. On the other hand, John was just glad that Sherlock had somewhere to go.

“You know, I promised her I’d punch you for that.”

“You can do that when I come home,” Sherlock agreed and when John stared at him in disbelief, he added: “In fact, you’ll probably have to.” Did that mean that Sherlock was already planning his return? That he was close?

“Sherlock? Do you have any idea... when that’ll be? When you’re coming home?” Having a date to look forward to might make things easier, even if it was still a long way off.

“It depends...”

“Just a rough estimate,” John begged. “Another year? Two?” Please don’t say more, it had just been a little over a year and it already felt like forever. John didn’t think he could make it that long twice over.

“Six months if I’m very lucky and some of the cells collapse on their own, nine if they don’t, a year if there are major complications,” So a year at most. That sounded doable. “I’ll contact you when I have a better estimate, then we can plan my resurrection,” Sherlock added.

“Okay,” John breathed. It was time for him to go. On impulse, he hugged Sherlock, whispering: “Please, please be careful.”

Sherlock whispered back: “Always.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, did I do a lot of research for this chapter! Not real research, mind you, I have to do enough of that for my thesis, just Google research, but that tends to be funnier anyway, since I get sidetracked a lot. Which is how I found out that if you order a 'Humpen' of beer, depending on where you are, you either get half a litre or five litres. And how is it that the profession that is most often addressed as doctor, usually doesn't even have a doctorate?  
> Yes we Austrians really are that possessive of our language. If you try to order a Apfelschorle instead of an Obi g'spritzt in Vienna the waiter will probably view you as a heathen.  
> And dyeing black hair grey for a short time with dry shampoo really works. My theatre group did that once when one of us was playing two roles the first an older gentleman and the second a younger fellow and he had to switch costume rather quickly.


	19. A Theory of Conspiracy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place a few weeks before "Many Happy Returns".
> 
> Also, I posted a [ companion piece ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7647796) to the previous chapter, which explores Sherlock's nightmare.

Philip Anderson was right. He knew he was. He’d gone over the whole thing so many times, looked from every angle, tried out every possible theory, but nothing else made any sense. There was no other theory that fit all of the facts.

The facts were the following:

1.) Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a fraud.

Philip had been going through his cases for months. At first he’d been trying to prove him guilty. He now knew that he’d been chosen for that task, precisely because he was so convinced of the man’s guilt. The Met didn’t want another scandal, so proving Sherlock guilty was in their best interest. However, with every case Philip had looked at, the truth had become more irrefutable. Sherlock Holmes was innocent. About a third of the cases he’d reviewed wouldn’t even have to be retried, because none of the evidence they’d used in court had been touched by Sherlock. Those had been the ones that had been deemed boring after about five minutes on the scene. Sherlock had examined the scene, pointed them to the culprit and then swanned off. Other cases were sure to hold up in court even if all the evidence Sherlock had touched was taken out of the equation. Quite a few of the perpetrators didn’t withdraw their confessions. And then there were the earliest cases, decades old cold cases Greg had given him before he trusted him with the active ones, most of them far too old for Sherlock to have been involved. All in all there were barely any cases where Sherlock could have committed the crime and even in those there was absolutely no sign that he had, it was just difficult to prove that he hadn’t. Even if he tried, there was no way Philip could prove Sherlock Holmes guilty, he couldn’t even conjecture him guilty.

It was an undeniable fact: Sherlock Holmes was innocent.

  1. a) Sherlock Holmes, wouldn’t have been convicted.



There was no doubt about that. Their case for arresting him had been rather windy in the first place. If he had come quietly, instead of resisting arrest and becoming a fugitive, he would have been out in a matter of days. As soon as they’d interviewed the Bruhl girl. She’d told them why she’d screamed when Holmes had entered the room only days after the detective’s suicide. Apparently the kidnapper had shown them pictures and told them that he was ‘the villain of this story’ and that he would come for them if they weren’t good and ate their chocolate.

That would probably have been enough to release him from custody, there might have been a court case, but since there was no evidence, Holmes would have undoubtedly walked free.

2.) Richard Brook was fake, James Moriarty was real.

The fake identity had been very convincing. So convincing that it could almost be considered a second identity instead of a fake one. Moriarty had actually worked as an actor under his false name and one could buy DVDs of his series. The director would tell you what a horror he’d been to work with and rant about nepotism in the business, if you asked. Moriarty had been careful to make an impression on everyone he’d worked with, but when you dug deeper that blazing trail vanished. No one at uni remembered him, none of his former teachers either, even if he was in the school records.

However when they followed up on the Carl Powers case, which according to Holmes had been Moriarty’s first murder, a few of the teachers remembered little Jimmy Moriarty, even if any record of his presence had been destroyed.

It was quite clear that the consulting criminal had been real.

  1. a) James Moriarty committed suicide.



Philip had seen the body, read the autopsy report, apart from being on a roof with Sherlock Holmes at the time of his death, there was no sign of foul play. Everything, the angle of the shot, the fingerprints on the gun, the powder burns on the victim’s fingers, everything pointed to suicide.

And while Philip didn’t doubt that Holmes was clever enough to kill someone and get off scot-free, he couldn’t see any way for that to be possible in this case. Murder-suicide didn’t make any sense anyway, if Holmes wasn’t guilty of the rest.

  1. b) Sherlock Holmes won his game against James Moriarty.



There was no reason for Moriarty to eat his gun unless Sherlock had won their game, and Moriarty would have spent the rest of his life in prison. What other reason could there be for a psychopath to kill himself?

3.) Sherlock Holmes had never cared about what the general populace thought of him.

He’d demonstrated that on multiple occasions, antagonising anyone he came in contact with, unless they were useful and even then he was only marginally less horrible to them. His name in the papers had annoyed him, but not because of what they were writing about him. His only concern had been that his face would be too well known to blend into the crowd any longer.

Sherlock Holmes hadn’t wanted a public image, but he couldn’t have cared less about the kind of public image he had.

  1. a) The people whose opinion Sherlock Holmes did care about never stopped believing in his innocence.



Greg had defended him and refused to take action until Philip and Sally had forced his hand.

He’d read the landlady’s statement. She’d described what was undoubtedly the worst tenant in London, all the while calling him her dear boy.

And John Watson? He’d posted his declaration on his blog, barely a week after Holmes jumped. By now he was fighting the trolls on the new entries.

Philip didn’t know if there was anyone else whose opinion Holmes might have cared about, but he was sure that if there was, the pattern would hold true. There must have been something about him, only apparent to those he cared about, that had made them believe in his innocence even when the evidence stood against it.

The people who mattered still believed in Sherlock Holmes.

 

The only viable conclusion was this:

1.) Sherlock Holmes had no reason to commit suicide.

  1. a) He was innocent, so he didn’t jump because he was guilty.
  2. b) The truth would have come out, so he didn’t jump because he thought he’d spend the rest of his life in prison.
  3. c) Moriarty was dead, so he didn’t jump because he was being forced.
  4. d) He won the game, so he didn’t jump because he lost.
  5. e) His friends still believed in him, so he didn’t jump because he was all alone and desperate.



2.) People don’t commit suicide for no reason.

Therefore Sherlock Holmes didn’t commit suicide.

He won the game, so he wasn’t murdered either.

3.) Sherlock Holmes faked his death.

Holmes had always enjoyed playing around with ordinary people and probably considered a lengthy court case beneath him. He wouldn’t have been consulted for it’s duration either and the hatchet job in the papers would probably have deprived him of private cases until his name was cleared too and from what Philip had heard, the man didn’t do well with inactivity. Disappearing for a while had obviously seemed more appealing, especially if Holmes knew that his name would be cleared sooner or later anyway and of course the man knew that.

Sherlock Holmes had to be alive, but no one believed Philip Anderson when he pointed out the obvious.

 

He could understand the higher-ups. They didn’t want another scandal and didn’t even want to believe that Holmes was innocent. They’d kept telling him to look for any signs of his guilt, but there was nothing to find, so Philip had spent his time looking for signs of the man’s survival instead. He’d found quite a few cases that would have appealed to Sherlock Holmes and had been solved by paying more attention to tiny little details than any normal human being could muster, strewn all over the globe. It was so obvious! Sherlock Holmes was in hiding, but he was getting bored and couldn’t keep himself from getting involved, just like when he was still in London. But when he’d told them about his findings, they had told him he was delusional and when he hadn’t budged in his conviction, they’d fired him. Well if they wanted a parrot who just repeated what they wanted him to say instead of trying to find the truth, he was glad to be rid of them.

Sally he could understand too. She didn’t want to believe in the freak’s innocence, because it would make her responsible for his death. Just like Philip was. It had been his fault as much as Sally’s that everyone had turned against Holmes, but he hadn’t been able to hide from the evidence, like she had. At least he knew that the detective wasn’t actually dead.

Greg however, had no reason not to believe him. He was just as keen on proving Holmes’ innocence as Philip was. They had compared notes on more than one occasion, they were in this together, but he didn’t seem to be able to take that last deductive leap to the detective faking his death. He always listened when Philip laid out his theory, but in the end he always shook his head and just looked at him sadly. Then he’d insist that that was the guilt talking, that Philip only believed what he wanted to believe. In the beginning when the theory had still been new, that had made Philip doubt himself, but he’d re-examined the facts, amassed more evidence and the theory still fit. He’d even tried to disprove his own theory in proper scientific fashion. He wasn’t completely sure how Holmes had done it, but he had made sure that it could be done. And if Philip Anderson could think of a way to do it, Sherlock Holmes could probably think of a dozen more.

His theory was solid. And deep down Greg had to know that, why else would he keep listening? Maybe if Philip got other people on his side, Greg would be more willing to believe. And then he might give him back his access to the police files and the Interpol database. Of course Philip had made copies of the relevant files before they’d let him go, but that had been almost a month ago, who knew what could have happened in his absence. There was an abundance of new data he didn’t have access to and how was he meant to prove that he was right without data?

He had to find an ally. Someone who already believed in Holmes innocence. Someone Greg would trust. He’d already interrogated the pathologist who’d done the post mortem, Greg had always seemed fond of her and there was even a chance that she’d been involved in the deception. He hadn’t been able to get a read on her, though. Either Holmes plan had been good enough to completely fool her, or she knew the truth and didn’t tell him even after Philip had assured her that he was on their side. Whatever the reason, she didn’t believe him and kept insisting that Holmes was definitely dead and yes she was sure it had in fact been Holmes’ body she’d examined and not someone else’s.

The next person on Philip’s list was John Watson. The man obviously believed in Holmes’ innocence, he’d be delighted to hear that his friend was still alive. Greg also dragged him out to the pub occasionally, so there was a good chance that Watson would be able to convince the man. He’d asked Greg for the address a few weeks before he’d realised the truth about Holmes’ apparent suicide, wanting to apologise for his role in the whole fiasco, but before he’d managed to work up the courage to face the doctor, inspiration had struck and he’d been occupied with more important things. He’d briefly considered that Watson might be in on the whole thing, but dismissed it as implausible when Greg had told him how worried he was about the doctor, if he knew about it, he wouldn’t still be acting like he was grieving, would he?

Bracing himself for the frosty welcome he was likely to receive until he got the chance to lay out his theory, Philip rang the bell to John Watson’s flat.

* * *

John almost dropped the plates he was packing when the doorbell rang.

Jesus, he was jumpy! At least Mary wasn’t here to see, since she was busy packing up her own flat. He really needed to get himself under control, though or Mary would pick up on it very soon. It just seemed like everything was going wrong lately and John felt like he was trapped and couldn’t do anything but wait for the next disaster to hit.

His relationship with Mary had been going far too fast for months and there was nothing he could do. Sherlock got himself hurt and there was no way John could make sure that he didn’t go back to fieldwork too soon. When Molly had turned up at the surgery on Mary’s day off a week ago, he’d instantly jumped to the worst possible conclusion. Instead Molly had informed him of a minor catastrophe he’d never even considered to be a possibility. If John would have had to guess who might figure out that Sherlock was alive... Well, his biggest fear would have been Mary. Apart from her, maybe some of Mycroft’s people, possibly Greg, since he was the only one John had told the truth about Sherlock’s ‘note’. He would never, not in a thousand years, have guessed Anderson.

The only silver lining was that apparently he came across as a mad conspiracy theorist, so hopefully no one who didn’t already suspect would put much stock in his claims. As long as they kept him away from Mary they should be fine. However if Anderson was looking for a receptive audience, John was probably at the very top of his list. Hence being startled by the doorbell.

On his way to the door, John wondered if there was anyone else it could be, but came up blank. Greg knew he was moving and would have called ahead to make sure John was actually there; Mrs Hudson didn’t even know where he lived at the moment, partly because John didn’t want her anywhere near Mary, though the main reason was that he hadn’t actually talked to her since he’d moved here; Mary had a key (John had decided he’d rather know that she could get in any time she wanted, than have her get a copy without his knowledge), so unless she’d forgotten it in the chaos of her own move, it couldn’t be her; and that was the entirety of his current social circle. Besides, the ring was all wrong for any of them. Once – short and hesitant – a few seconds pause – then again – longer with more conviction. _Insecure, not sure of their welcome, the second ring, because they weren’t sure the first one would have been heard, insecure enough to not ring properly the first time, but too impatient to wait and see if they’d been heard despite their dithering,_ Sherlock’s voice in his head provided. Deducing doorbells, it was one of the few topics where Sherlock had managed to teach John his methods, probably because they got so much practice, whenever clients came by. And right now the doorbell was telling John that it was showtime.

He’d lain awake for hours at night after Molly had warned him, trying and failing to imagine how he’d feel if he really believed that Sherlock was dead and a year later, when he was finally starting to move on, Anderson, one of the people responsible for the detective’s demise, came to him and tried to tell him that Sherlock was alive, presenting harebrained theories supported by circumstantial evidence. Those kinds of emotion probably defied categorisation anyway. His reaction would probably depend on how tactful Anderson was in laying out his theories, if he forgot to apologise for his involvement, John might get away with throwing him out of his flat head-first, but, John reminded himself, he shouldn’t get his hopes up. According to Greg, Anderson had changed a lot since John had last seen him. Pity, John could have almost looked forward to this conversation if it promised to end in a good fight. However, if he couldn’t make it clear that Anderson was _not welcome_ anywhere near him, John would have to walk the tightrope between listening enough for Anderson to feel that he got his point across, but not enough for him to believe that he’d convinced John, since an error in either direction would probably prompt the man to come back, which was the last thing John needed.

He’d have to tell Greg too, the next time they saw each other, because he had to talk to someone or risk seeming too unaffected and it couldn’t be Mary. His acting wasn’t that good. His acting probably wasn’t good enough for Greg either, now that he thought about it, he honestly didn’t know how he’d made it this far without anyone finding out. Maybe he could just call Greg right after, to get it out of the way? Voices were always easier to fake than the whole thing.

Steeling himself for the conversation to come and the acting that would be required of him, John buzzed Anderson in.

* * *

The name on the mobile-screen read: _John Watson_. Greg scrambled to answer, because John _never_ called. Not since... Well, not since Sherlock. Greg didn’t think he got as much as an unprompted text from the man in the last year. If Greg didn’t know better, he’d think that John was trying to cut himself off from all of his friends, hell Greg didn’t actually know better, for all he knew that was exactly what John was trying to do. He’d started to get better about replying over the last few months though, which meant Greg didn’t have to send around fifteen increasingly worried follow up texts to get a single two word reply, and about half the time he even answered his phone, but this was still the first time John had initiated any kind of contact. Greg didn’t know whether he should be happy or extremely worried.

No way to find out, but to pick up.

“John?”

_“Why on earth would you give Anderson my address?”_ John’s voice was trembling, whether with suppressed fury or something else, Greg couldn’t tell over the phone.

“What?” what would Anderson want with – “Oh god, tell me he didn’t!” Greg groaned. There was only one thing Anderson would want to talk to John about, hell there was only one thing Anderson wanted to talk to anyone about. Sherlock.

_“If you’re talking about telling me about his crazy theory, then sorry, but yes he did.”_

“Shit. You alright?” John didn’t like it when he asked, but in this case Greg felt it was warranted. John still got silent and withdrawn whenever the conversation turned to Sherlock, it was getting better and updating the old blog again probably helped, but that didn’t mean that John was ready for Anderson.

_“I... what do you think?”_ It had been almost a year since John hadn’t at least answered with an insincere ‘fine’ and in recent months Greg had almost started to believe him when he said it. The evasion now was worrying to say the least.

“I’m so sorry, I never thought... I gave him your address months ago. He said he wanted to apologise, we were still working together and he was having a rough time so I thought...” Greg trailed off. God, what a mess! Anderson had asked for the address when he’d first realised that Sherlock couldn’t possibly be a fake, and Greg had given it to him in the hope that apologising would help with the guilt. He’d meant to warn John that Anderson might stop by back then too, but somehow it had slipped his mind, when the Chief Superintendent once again swamped him with paperwork as had been his wont ever since Greg had refused to testify against Sherlock and Anderson had never mentioned it again and eventually Greg had forgotten all about it. And then Anderson had started spouting his theories and things had gone downhill from there. Anderson had lost his job for wasting of police resources i.e. trying to prove Sherlock alive instead of guilty (or at least innocent, though the higher ups would prefer guilty), which the Chief Superintendent was using as an excuse to have other people re-evaluate Anderson’s work of the past year, further stalling the clearing of Sherlock’s name. Who was wasting police resources now?

_“He – he never did, you know? Apologise I mean, just barged in and started talking, took me almost a minute to catch up to what he was saying.”_

“You didn’t... believe him, did you?”

_“I...”_ John started. The following pause seemed to go on forever. Greg silently gathered his keys and phone, deciding then and there that he’d go over there, no matter what John answered. _“I wanted to...”_ John continued, _“I asked him not to be dead once, you know. A few weeks after, I went to the grave with Mrs Hudson and I asked him to... stop being dead. And if he’d told me all that stuff back then... I...probably would’ve gone down the deep end and ended up wondering for the rest of my life. God, I wanted to believe Anderson, but I told him that... Sherlock is dead... had to do it three times before he left... I might have shouted it the last time...”_ Yes, Greg was definitely going to go over there. No one should have to be alone after that kind of conversation.

While he put on his coat he asked: “You want some company? I could come over.” Not that the answer mattered, but it was still polite to ask.

Apparently John had picked up on that, because he answered: _“Do I have a choice?”_

“Nope, I’ll be there in half an hour, tops.”

Then he locked the door behind himself and went to visit John Watson.


	20. Coping Mechanisms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short teaser chapter, to prove I'm still writing and to tide you over while I start my (hopefully) last term as an undergrad student and try to work out how to save my plot from the reality bashing it got when I started researching the next story arc.

John was meeting Mike Stamford for lunch. Well that was his alibi anyway. His real goal was to pass another note to Molly. He had the afternoon free, while Mary was still stuck at work after he had ‘been a nice guy’ and switched shifts with Dr Lewis so his colleague could pick up his daughter, who was returning from a school trip with a big suitcase, she couldn’t possibly get home on her own. John had made a habit out of swapping shifts with anyone who asked over the last year to get guaranteed Mary-free time-off without raising suspicion and Lewis, being a single father, was a common candidate.

John had told Mike that he wasn’t sure when his shift would actually end, instead of just technically being over, but with paperwork still to complete, so he’d offered to just drop by his office at Bart’s, so no one would have to wait. Mike didn’t need to know that John had an ulterior motive for his visit to Bart’s. Namely dropping by the morgue and talking to Molly. Being able to get there unseen was one skill he had to thank Sherlock for, who had once pointed out to him which corridors and staircases were used the least depending on the time of day and which ones had convenient hiding places.

John knew that what he was doing today was essentially useless and not necessary at all. When he’d started he’d been able to justify these acquisitions rather easily, but it got harder as time went on and by now the only reason he was still doing this was that the risk was low and it would make him feel a bit better, safer and more in control. He figured he could use all the safety he could get, living with an assassin and getting back a modicum of control, when the last decision he’d made of his own free will and not because it was the only viable course of action under the circumstances, had been a year and a half ago, when he had to live with someone he feared, but at the same time couldn’t help but like, when he caught himself wondering if he was suffering from an unusual form of Stockholm Syndrome, because he couldn’t deny that he was falling in love any longer, some control over his out-of-control life, was exactly what he needed.

At first this... habit of his, had been completely practical. After he’d returned from Austria he’d realised that a repeat of that situation was entirely in the realm of possibility and it would be a good idea to be prepared better the next time. If Sherlock’s injuries had been more serious, they would have reached the point where John wouldn’t have been able to help any longer very quickly and if John hadn’t been able to procure antibiotics, the situation could have turned very ugly very fast.

A page stolen off a colleague’s prescription pad here and there, a few faked signatures no one would ever look at anyway and five or six visits to pharmacies in parts of the city where no one knew him, but he had an entirely legit reason for being, provided John with a few different kinds of broadband antibiotics, prescription painkillers and some other potentially useful medications. John stored his haul in one of Sherlock’s hideouts that was conveniently situated en route to Heathrow, so he could take everything with him when he went on a conference.

Next he’d stocked the routes to the other London airports, so he wouldn’t have to limit himself when booking flights. After that was done he thought: What if it didn’t happen at a conference but here in London? So he started establishing stocks close to likely places like the surgery, his and Mary’s place, Molly’s flat, Baker Street and after some consideration Greg’s place and Bart’s.

Parallel to his quest to make medical supplies as easy to access as possible wherever he happened to be, John had decided to expand his inventory with a few things he couldn’t get his hands on with something as simple as a stolen prescription. Which is where Molly came in. A chance meeting (that wasn’t really that chance), while he was waiting for Mike, three minutes of small talk, before she hurried off and a surreptitiously slipped note were all it took and a week later John was distributing local anaesthetics between his hideouts. Two weeks after that it was IV equipment and so on. All things that could be useful in a crisis, though with every time they repeated this dance, it got less likely that John would ever actually need what he was requesting. However, Molly never called him out on it and the risk was rather low, so John saw no reason to stop what he was doing.

He did tell himself that this time would be the last time, that he had everything he could possibly (and in the case of some of his latest acquisitions impossibly) need and that even a small risk was unacceptable if taking it, didn’t gain you anything. John knew though, that he would completely disregard those good intentions the next time he lay awake at night and thought up a new way for Sherlock to die, because John didn’t have what he needed to treat him.

 

* * *

 

 

Hundreds of miles away, on Sherlock’s side of the game, things weren’t going so smoothly either. In fact things had been going wrong at an alarming rate for months now. Ever since the disastrous end of his mission in Vienna, Sherlock had almost been killed twice, and only narrowly escaped undetected five times and even when didn’t find himself in any acute danger he was encountering disconcerting signs in almost all of the cells he investigated. Out of the 21 groups he’d brought down in the last five months, 19 had known someone was coming, 7 had even had the right timeframe, in the cases of 8 from the 12 that had wrong or no information about when the infiltration would happen, Sherlock had been the only one who knew the truth so they were mostly irrelevant, beyond the possibility of tracking the false information back to the breach in the 3 cases where their information about the timing had been erroneous instead of nonexistent, the other 5 cases were useless for tracking down the leak.

That was supposed to be Mycroft’s job, since it was his secret service the leaks were obviously coming from. No one else was in possession of the information that was being leaked. However Sherlock’s brother hadn’t been holding up his part of the game in that regard. When Sherlock had informed him of the potential spy in his ranks while he’d been camped out in Molly’ bedroom, Mycroft had promised to weed them out within the week, but five months later they were still tapping in the dark, unable to trust anyone.

At first they’d resorted to giving the reconnaissance teams false information about when their gathered data would be used, which affected the usefulness of their reports, since they weren’t targeted at the right timeframe anymore, which decreased Sherlock’s efficiency in infiltrating and eliminating parts of the network. Four months ago Mycroft had estimated that the lack of current intel would add two months to the duration of the mission. That would have been an acceptable sacrifice, if it had yielded the desired results, but according to Mycroft none of his operatives had the same pattern of knowledge Sherlock had encountered in the network. No one even came close. Even taking into account the possibility of multiple spies and combining their knowledge failed to replicate the patterns.

And now, to make a bad situation worse, the supposedly impossible had happened.

Twice.

Information only Sherlock and Mycroft were supposed to know leaked. This wasn’t simply a mole, this was a complete breach of security. Their communication was no longer secure. Someone was listening. Probably not all the time, or Sherlock would have been captured or killed already. The only silver lining was that Mycroft had been treating him like any other agent. No concern (not that Mycroft actually cared), no names (not even fake ones), no extraneous words (having to talk to Mycroft on a regular basis was bad enough already), just ‘Agent’. Sherlock’s identity was safe and so was John.

Something had to be done to ensure his own survival, though. Taking care of the breach was Mycroft’s job, there was nothing Sherlock could do to help with that. Not when their lines of communication were compromised and they never knew who might be listening. First Sherlock would reschedule and change plans on everything he’d discussed with, or even mentioned to Mycroft. Then he wouldn’t tell Mycroft about those changes, for obvious reasons. The less they communicated the better. In fact Sherlock wouldn’t involve his brother in his upcoming plans at all anymore, which meant he’d have to make do without any reconnaissance from Mycroft and go in blind, which would take much longer and increase the risk of making a mistake, but was still safer than potentially walking into a trap. Getting resources like money and aliases should be safe though, as long as he requested them from a location where he didn’t intend to infiltrate anything in the near future or had already finished his job. The time he’d waste waiting for his things in places where he couldn’t do anything useful would add to the duration of his exile even more. At his best guess he’d be in the field for at least two months more than previously estimated, pushing his return back to at least the end of June five months from now. That was, if nothing else went horribly wrong, and taking into account how things had been going recently, Sherlock wouldn’t count on that.


	21. Sugar, Sugar

In Nuevo Laredo, calling himself José Toca and looking like an out-of-work day labourer who was desperate to feed his family, Sherlock was trying to get recruited by the Los Zetas Cartel. Again. This was the last operation of the last cartel before he’d finally be done with Mexico, so by now he’d had a lot of practice with the process.

He had hired a fake family to take care of, just in case someone followed him ‘home’. He’d been doing it this way, ever since exactly that had happened when he’d been working for the Cartel del Golfo. He’d managed to talk his way out of that one, but it had been an unnecessarily close call. The John in his mind palace had had some very choice words about reckless behaviour in the wake of it.

Sherlock’s deal with the family was two months rent plus everything he earned from the cartel in the three days he expected to spend there, in exchange for their cover story. They were ripping him off of course, charging him at least twice the average going rate of flats in the area, but money was the one commodity he still had quick and practically unlimited access to, so that was the least of his problems and as long as the matron of the family thought she was getting the better deal, she was less likely to complain.

Sherlock just couldn’t wait to be done here. This was the kind of job he could have completed in a few days if he’d still had access to all of Mycroft’s resources, but it had already taken him over three weeks and counting on his own, because he had to gather information in a bottom up fashion through infiltration of the lower ranks instead of requesting an overview of the situation and solving the patterns remotely, before going in, or even easier, tipping off the authorities, and quickly getting rid of the relevant people.

His current modus operandi had taken some time to get used to. Back in London the goal had always been to solve the case and apprehend all the criminals involved. During his mission, law enforcement hadn’t always been available to do the job, but Sherlock’s focus had largely stayed the same, concentrating on the complete collapse of each and every cell. However for the last few months, he’d steadily lost access to Mycroft’s resources and the cells he was working on kept getting bigger and more complex, since he was now done with the supply lines and was now in the process of eliminating the core organisations. He had to get rid of that before he could remove the funding machinery and watch the rest collapse on its own. That was why lately doing it properly hadn’t always been an option if he didn’t want to spend several months on each cell. Luckily he’d discovered that a lot of the time a cell’s connection to the network was more tenuous than expected. Sometimes the only link was the main leadership and staging a coup to replace them was enough to sever it, especially now that there weren’t that many cells left that could try to reconnect the link by contacting the new leader. Other times it was a bit more complicated, with the links distributed throughout the organisation. However those were usually easier to eliminate than the leaders. In both situations the cell survived after Sherlock was done with it, deprived only of its connection to Moriarty’s network. Some of them would collapse anyway at some point, without the support of the network when they ran into problems, while others would continue to exist for decades. It didn’t matter to Sherlock once the connection was severed. The John in his head disagreed on principle, but agreed in practice.

Of course, there was a certain risk involved in this method. If he missed even a single one of Moriarty’s operatives, it wouldn’t take long for them to rebuild the connections, just like a single viable bacterial cell could overgrow an otherwise sterile medium. That’s why Sherlock had kept to the complete collapse method as long as he had, but at some point he’d had to admit that, without Mycroft’s help, it wasn’t working that way any longer. He suspected that even with Mycroft’s help he’d have had to resort to the new method once he’d started on Mexico, because for some reason Moriarty had fingers in absolutely every pie here. While in most other places Moriarty had had control over one or maybe two of the more successful crime syndicates, all over Middle America and in some parts of South America, he was involved in almost all of them, though they all thought that they were the only ones of their competitors to have caught Moriarty’s interest. The ones he wasn’t controlling usually didn’t survive long.

There was no way he could have single-handedly collapsed most of the Mexican drug trade when the authorities had been trying and failing for decades. At least the American ‘War on Drugs’, as ill advised as it was, actually made the part of getting rid of the key players rather easy once he’d identified them. Especially because in this case the individuals actually involved with Moriarty’s network usually weren’t the leaders, but strategically distributed in what, in a legal business, would be the middle management. Therefore they weren’t as well protected as they could be and regularly got their hands dirty in a fashion that could be busted by the police.

To speed up the recruitment, Sherlock entered a bar in a bad neighbourhood and proceeded to _not_ drink himself into insensibility, which, in this particular locale, attracted quite a bit of attention. When he was sure some of the right people were watching out of the corners of their eyes and the barkeeper asked for the third time if he was sure he didn’t want a refill he started to talk, relating the whole sob story about the lost job, the sick mother in law, the fifth daughter and the rent increase he’d made up. The barkeeper forcefully urged him to pay his drink and threw him out on his arse, because he’d just made clear that he wasn’t going to be a paying customer anymore than he already was. Five minutes later on his way ‘home’ he was accosted and offered the solution for all his problems. After another half hour he had a well paying, if not exactly legal, job in dispatch. The next day Sherlock was handling thousands of dollars worth of cocaine in a lonely room in the basement of a sugar cane mill.

And wouldn’t Mycroft disapprove of that. Maybe it was a good thing they weren’t in contact at the moment, if it spared him that particular lecture. Except it didn’t really, since ever since he’d lost his connection to Mycroft and with it his ability to properly communicate with someone he trusted, at least where his mission was concerned, the John in his mind palace had been getting steadily more vocal and he’d made his disapproval very clear the first time Sherlock had taken this kind of job in the interest of infiltration. He’d shut up about it after nothing happened the first time, though.

“Those are the sugar packs, those the double layered ones and those are pure coke, they all look exactly the same so don’t mix them up. Got it?” Alvaro, who was showing him the ropes of his new job, pulled him out of his musings.

“Yes, sugar, double layer, coke,” Sherlock pointed out the right stacks, making sure to hesitate a bit in order to appear of slightly below average intelligence, but still useful.

“Good, you stack them on the pallet according to this scheme,” Alvaro continued, handing Sherlock a badly drawn diagram, “You can keep this for today, but I’m going to burn it when our shift ends and you need to have it memorized by then.” Of course Sherlock was already done with that by the time Alvaro had finished speaking, but he kept that to himself and repeated his mantra of the past few weeks: _slightly below average intelligence, don’t stand out, slightly below..._ and so on. It was starting to get seriously annoying by now. Instead he asked a few inane questions about how to read the diagram.

That resulted in Alvaro showing him how to do it on the first pallet, which Sherlock silently observed, forehead creased as if it was the most complicated thing he’d ever been asked to do. God he couldn’t wait to be out of here, he could practically feel his brain atrophying, synapses disconnecting, neurons curling up and dieing a horribly painful death.

_Don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic?_ John commented.

_No I’m not! This is torture._ If he talked back John usually stayed longer and Sherlock could use the distraction

_So you’ve already figured out the system behind the stacking scheme?_ John asked him in the same expectant voice he’d always used on their cases when he asked: _You’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?_

_Statistics._ Sherlock answered before remembering. _But you’re in my head, you already know that._

_Humour me?_

_Fine,_ Sherlock relented, _that sugar will be sent to another company in the States, disguised as a wholesaler they also supply dealers, so they actually have a use for both the sugar and the drugs. The stacking scheme is a statistically accurate representation of the packs that are most likely to be chosen during a spot check, meant to maximise the amount of cocaine they can transport, while keeping the probability of being found out so close to zero as to be negligible._

_That’s brilliant!_ John exclaimed, then: _Better?_ in that wry voice of his that always hid a fond smile, knowing exactly how much showing off to an imaginary audience helped and how much it didn’t.

_A bit,_ Sherlock answered anyway, barely remembering to keep the answering smile in his head instead of on his face. _It would be better if you were actually here, though._

Once Alvaro was done with the first pallet, Sherlock did the second one on his own, still under the watchful eye of his teacher. He took much longer than he needed to, consulting the diagram for every packet and making sure he had the right stack multiple times in the beginning, before making it seem like he was picking up confidence and starting to work a bit faster but still slow enough to double check everything. When he was finally done Alvaro slapped him on the back and left.

The moment the door closed behind the other man, Sherlock started working much faster. Alvaro had told him that he’d be back at lunch to check on him, so Sherlock had calculated how many pallets he’d be able to fill at José’s supposed speed until then. Once he was done with half of those he left the room to explore, starting the timer in his head so he could return in time to finish the rest before lunchtime.

Sherlock was keeping to the areas of plausible deniability for now, where he could easily claim that he got lost on the way to the loo if someone objected to his presence. He knew he wouldn’t get the information he needed here, but it was important to get a feel for the layout of the building before attempting to enter forbidden areas.

He returned to his room without incident and when Alvaro came to check on him, he found exactly what he had expected. Alvaro waited until Sherlock was done with the pallet he was working on, before showing him the way to the factory canteen. The canteen was in a different building than the room Sherlock worked in, which worked to his advantage, because it gave him a good reason to be in more places across the factory grounds.

“So, you smoke?” Alvaro asked when they were done eating.

“Yes, of course.” Sherlock had learned a long time ago that this was the only acceptable answer, if he wanted people to trust him. It was completely irrational of course but for some reason sharing vices inspired trust, or maybe it was the time spent together during smoking breaks.

Surprisingly, Alvaro was less annoying than Sherlock expected him to be. He was quite intelligent despite his poor education and had more insight into the cartel’s business than Sherlock would expect from a lowly factory worker, but then he’d been working here for over ten years. It was probably inevitable that he’d pick some things up. Some careful prying under the guise of idle curiosity later, Sherlock had a much clearer image of where to get the information he needed. This was going so much better than Sherlock had expected. If his afternoon excursion was successful, he could be out of the country by tomorrow evening.

It was almost too easy to be true.

In hindsight that should have been his first warning sign.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amount of research I did for this and the next chapter is ridiculous. Seriously, I've done scientific presentations at uni I did less research for. I now know far too much about sugar processing, cocaine, drug cartels, Mexicos economy and education system and another mystery topic that won't be revealed until the next chapter and most of it I won't even use.   
> On a side note: You know you got lost on Wikipedia again when you find something like this: The Yogurt Connection was a drug smuggling ring that operated out of Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.


	22. It's a Test

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNIG in the end notes because of spoilers.

In the afternoon Sherlock repeated his routine from the morning. Finish half the expected workload, sneak away to investigate, come back in time to finish his work, before Alvaro came back at the end of his shift. It all went off without a hitch. During his excursion he’d easily found the factory manager’s office, slipped in, knowing that no one was going to be there, thanks to Alvaro’s invaluable information. He did feel a bit uneasy, because he hadn’t taken the time to properly inspect all the possible escape routes, but the factory manager would be back the next day and Sherlock didn’t know whether this opportunity would repeat itself soon. If he didn’t take this risk he might be stuck here for another week. So he pushed down his misgivings and concentrated on his task.

He needn’t have worried. When he left half an hour later with incriminating documents and information about the movements of Moriarty’s operatives within this organisation tucked beneath the insole of his left shoe two hours later, the corridor was empty and he made it back to his workroom without drawing attention.

At the end of Sherlock’s shift, Alvaro stopped by to take back the diagram. The moment the door handle started to move, Sherlock reduced his stacking speed by half and arranged his face into a grimace of concentration, trying to look like his task was stretching his mental capabilities as far as they would go. One last round of stupid and then he could get the hell out of here. He’d deliver the stolen documents to the appropriate authorities (a mix of Mexican and American, police, military and secret service contacts he had already used before and who had been thoroughly vetted) and go on to his next task.

He’d decided that he deserved a bit of a treat after the ordeal that had been the Mexican cartels, so his next stop might almost be fun. Disguised as Professor Sigerson he was going to infiltrate the research laboratory of Bayer Pharmaceuticals in the Turku Science Park in Finland, which was involved in providing Moriarty’s network with new poisons that wouldn’t show up in standard tox-screens and other commissions. They were also producing some top-notch cancer research though, so Sherlock didn’t want to disband them completely if he could help it. Oh, he was so looking forward to working with moderately intelligent people again and finally shedding the simpleton’s mask.

Before he could sink his teeth into that one, however, he had to suffer through one last conversation with Alvaro. He was making it more bearable by only listening with half an ear, giving all the right answers on autopilot (yes, I memorised it; no, I don’t know if I’ll still know it tomorrow; yes please, watch me do the first stack tomorrow, to make sure I don’t mess up) while he was using most of his mental capacity for fleshing out Sigerson’s personality. Some of that work had already been done by those of Mycroft’s agents who had worn him before and published papers in his name, painting the picture of a prolific young biochemist, who had a keen interest in protein engineering and post-translational modifications. Someone who was well travelled, having published papers with research teams all over the world, and dedicated to his work, but not sociable, preferring the lab over his colleagues, if his absence from most conferences was any indication. It was the kind of career Sherlock himself might have had if he’d made different decisions in his youth. As such it was a perfect fit for a cover that he would have to keep for a while, since he could be mostly himself as long as he kept his mouth shut about any deductions he made. Appearing intelligent, brilliant even wouldn’t be a detriment anymore, but an asset.

“Have you ever tried it?” was the question that pulled Sherlock out of his head. It was unexpected and therefore couldn’t be handled on autopilot. Alvaro was gesturing towards the neatly stacked sugar and cocaine, making it obvious what he was referring to.

Despite being caught off guard, Sherlock managed to answer quickly: “Do I look like I can afford that stuff?” That should be the correct answer. Not only did it fit with the rest of his assumed identity, it should also reassure Alvaro that he wouldn’t be trying to steal anything for his personal use. Not that he would be coming back after he left today, but due to the documents hidden in his shoe he’d prefer to give the full body search a miss.

“It’s a lot cheaper when you’re working at the source. In fact, it’s included in your wages.”

“What? No one mentioned that yesterday.” Sherlock was positive that his surprise appeared genuine, mostly because it was. Why would they do this? Why would they want to get their workforce addicted? Wouldn’t that make them more likely to steal from the cartel?

“Well, if it became public knowledge that we’re handing out coke to our workers, all the junkies of Tamaulipas would charge our gates. So we make sure newcomers are trustworthy before we tell them about that extra perk.” So they didn’t want addicts? Then why were they creating them? And were they really so quick to trust him? He’d been working here for all of a day and they were already calling him trustworthy? Maybe they’d done a background check on him? Or this was a test, but if it was, what was the right answer? _Not to take it of course,_ John piped up, but Sherlock pushed his commentary down ruthlessly. What John thought about this didn’t matter, what Sherlock wanted didn’t matter, the only thing that mattered was keeping his cover for another 12 hours so he could finish his work and leave the country.

“If you don’t want yours, you’re free to sell it,” Alvaro continued, “either on the street or to other workers. Some people make a tidy profit that way, but everyone tries it at least once.” Oh, so it was a test, but not the kind Sherlock had thought at first. It wasn’t about whether or not he’d take it. That part was a given ( _no it’s not, you need to find another way_ ), the test was what happened after. It was actually pretty clever. You can’t watch every worker all the time and weak spots often don’t show up right away... Unless you triggered them. And that was exactly what they were doing. Give every worker one dose of coke when they start, then see what happens. Those who come back for more, you keep away from the drugs. Give them a job in accounting under the guise of a promotion or something. If their usage doesn’t escalate, they’ll be your most productive workers, and they’ll be bound by more than just loyalty or fear, because they’d never be able to fund a drug habit anywhere else. Those who get taken over by the drug, you cut loose, turn them from employees into customers. Those who are not interested after the first try, you can trust. Sherlock could tell that Alvaro belonged into the third category.

_Great you solved it, now get the hell out of there!_ John’s voice in his head was a lot harder to shake than usual. Not that Sherlock usually wanted to do that, but right now John’s presence wasn’t helping, because while Sherlock agreed with him on principle that taking the cocaine was probably a bad idea, he wasn’t quite as optimistic that he would find another way out.

“Maybe tomorrow, my wife’s expecting me for dinner, celebrating my new job,” Sherlock tried. It was the only real excuse he had. The carefully constructed facade of unassuming stupidity that had served him so well in the past, by letting curious eyes glide right off him, was now working against him. With his supposed level of education, there was little he could say that couldn’t be effectively counteracted with a good mix of lies and peer pressure. Sherlock could see the conversation unfold before him argument by argument, and nothing he could say would affect the outcome.

_You won’t know that if you don’t even try!_ John chimed in again. Annoyed now at having been ignored before.

_Trying to evade it will make me look too suspicious,_ Sherlock argued. _I’ve been acting far too naive to claim any personal experience and José certainly doesn’t have the education to have effective arguments._ At lunch Sherlock had told Alvaro most of José’s made up life story in an effort to make himself seem as harmless as possible and encourage trust and with it the sharing of information. That plan had been a success, Sherlock did have everything he needed less than 24 hours after going undercover, after all. Maybe he should have been more careful about caging himself in, though.

_Well, make something up, then. Tell another sob story about your second degree cousin, who got into drugs and died or something._ John insisted, still not quite seeing the problem.

_Won’t work, personal anecdote, isolated incident,_ Sherlock explained, _he’ll say that that’s not what usually happens, that only the weak of mind succumb to that kind of thing, he’ll tell me that he’s been using for over a decade and is fine and I won’t have any ground to stand on to prove he’s lying, because I’m stupid fucking José Toca, who couldn’t tell flour from cocaine if his life depended on it._ He should have put more thought into José’s background, instead of making it up on the fly. He might have prevented this if he’d just thought to make some of his tragic life the result of the drug use of others, but he hadn’t been expecting something like this to happen, so he’d elected to keep drugs out of his family history, so no one could mistake his bad luck for a grudge.

_Keep telling yourself that, but I’m not buying it. There has to be another way! There always is!_ John remained stubborn for the first time since he’d started talking to Sherlock in his mind. He’d been little more than a sounding board in the beginning, mostly listening and offering his opinion only when asked. He’d started challenging Sherlock a few weeks after he’d lost direct contact to Mycroft, but until now he’d always conceded the point once Sherlock had laid out his reasoning and exhausted his arguments.

_Not in this case, John,_ Sherlock ended the conversation and pushed John’s presence out of his mind to concentrate on Alvaro.

Despite his pessimistic outlook, Sherlock still tried to voice a few misgivings. Just to check that he was right about the answers he would receive. He owed John that much at least. Not that it changed anything. The outcome stayed the same. The conversation ended with a 50 mg line of coke and a part of his daily wage rolled up between Sherlock’s fingers.

Alvaro was giving him some last minute instructions Sherlock wasn’t listening to, he knew how this worked. 50 mg were a typical beginner’s dose, maybe a bit high considering the probable purity of the product. There’s no use cutting it before transportation, if you’re delivering to your own people after all and since the origin was also part of Moriarty’s network, they wouldn’t have adulterated it either. Sherlock was no first time user though, and he knew from experience that even properly purified (knowing his chemistry had come in very handy in the past) that amount wouldn’t be enough for a proper high. It had been a few years though, it would be interesting to see how his tolerance had changed. But even if he took that into account Sherlock knew he wouldn’t be too impaired. The risk of exposing himself would therefore be minimal.

It would be fine. He’d snort the line, exaggerate the effects, wait for it to wear off and leave unsearched. No problem. He’d be fine. The mission would be fine. There would be no risk of anyone finding the documents. He could handle this. Everything would be fine.

John didn’t offer any more criticisms either, in fact, he seemed to have left the mind palace.

The risk was minimal. It would be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Drug use
> 
>  
> 
> I don't want to know what the NSA thinks about my recent search history... 
> 
> On a funnier note: In this week's edition of random information I came across while binge-researching: Heroin was trademarked and marketed by Bayer as a cough suppressant and non-addictive substitute for morphine from 1898 to 1910.


	23. Wrong Answer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, that came together quicker than I thought. Using writing as a reward for studying seems to be working...
> 
> The trigger warning for drug use from last chapter still applies.

_“Thank you for your cooperation Mr Holmes.”_

....

....

....

Something was wrong!

Sherlock startled awake, instantly on high alert. Or as alert as one could be when waking up from drug induced unconsciousness. As it was, the adrenalin boost did little to counteract his splitting headache and only increased his general disorientation. He was still in his workroom, sitting in... Since when was there a chair in this room? There hadn’t been one earlier, he was... sure of that? Reasonably sure, yes. Anyway, it was a wonder he hadn’t fallen off while... Oh. Right. He was tied to the chair. That explained things. But did anything explain the being-tied-up? No memory was immediately forthcoming. Back to surroundings then. Workroom. Chair. The pallets he’d stacked were gone and he was alone. But something had woken him, a voice, maybe.

Something was wrong. Something about the voice, something it had said...

There was a horrible rotten-onion taste in his mouth that was making him nauseous, or maybe that was the after-effect of whatever he’d been dosed with. The taste certainly wasn’t making it better. The taste... there was something about the taste that should ring a bell, but didn’t. Not a sense memory, those were usually easy to access, even under adverse circumstances, it had to be related to knowledge. No use trying the mind-palace in this state, too slow. The taste/smell was in his nose too, more garlicky there... and his nose hurt, the mucous membranes more than just irritated.

What the hell had happened?

He remembered getting the documents. He could still feel them, when he moved the toes of his left foot. Good, no one had found them. So why was he tied up then? They weren’t that well hidden. If he’d somehow given himself away, they would have searched him and found them. Unless they had found them and wanted him to believe they hadn’t? Why? To find out whom he worked for, maybe? But why tie him up then? If they’d wanted to lull him into a false sense of security, they should have left him on the floor and hoped that he didn’t know how a cocaine comedown –

Felt.

Oh.

That’s what happened. Except it wasn’t. At least it wasn’t all. He knew how it felt to come down from cocaine and this.

Wasn’t.

It.

This was wrong.

For starters his nose hurt far too much. Cocaine would irritate, yes, but this felt like he’d snorted ammonium or something even more caustic. And then there was the smell/taste. Everything pointed to him having been drugged with something else, something he hadn’t been expecting... Or maybe he had and didn’t remember? He hated not finding his memories where they were supposed to be. Something had woken him up in a panic, something was wrong. More wrong than being tied up in the basement of a drug cartel. The ropes wouldn’t be that hard to escape and he knew the layout of the building, he’d probably be fine, but something was niggling at him. He knew this wasn’t it, there was something else, something worse, he just couldn’t quite grasp it. Something someone had said to him. Or maybe whatever he’d been dosed with happened to cause paranoia? Irrelevant, he was tied up in the basement of a drug cartel, any amount of paranoia was probably justified.

He wasn’t getting anywhere like this. So getting out should probably be his first priority if he couldn’t figure out why he could sense impending doom loom over him.

Setting himself free was the work of fifteen minutes. Their first mistake had been to only fix his calves to the legs of the chair, without tying his thighs down to the seat or properly immobilising his ankles, giving his feet enough wiggle room to enable him to inch over to where he’d left the scissors (mistake number two, leaving scissors in the room with him) he’d used for the plastic wrap that would protect the pallets he’d stacked. Once he got there, mistake number three, the low back of the chair, allowed Sherlock to rock the chair back and forth until it tipped over backwards so his hands landed directly on the thankfully closed scissors. The cuts would have been worth it, but he’d prefer to keep all of his blood inside, thank you very much.

The backwards-falling-vertigo re-awoke the nausea, the impact jostled his headache and an unexpected amount of pain shot through his arms where the back of the chair landed on them, the combination leaving him breathless on the floor for a full minute, trying desperately not to lose his lunch in a position where he might choke on it, while the back of the chair continued to dig into his arms. Once he had himself under control again, he made sure that he had a decent grip on the scissors (mistake number four, using a chair with a back that had a hole in the middle, giving Sherlock enough wiggle room to grip the scissors), before twisting his hips until he got the leverage to push down with his knees and turn himself and the chair over on his left side (mistake number three again, low backed chair). The movement wrenched his right shoulder, and now most of the weight from his upper body was digging into his left upper arm via the side of the backrest. The combination almost made him let go of the scissors, but now that he had more room he could open the scissors and slice at the ropes binding his wrists together. It was an arduous process, because scissors aren’t made for slicing with just one blade like a knife. The material isn’t cut by the blade, but by the local shear forces produced by the diametrically opposed movement of both blades, which meant that as long as the blades pass close enough to each other, they don’t actually have to be sharp enough to cut anything on their own. That was good news for Sherlock’s hands, as he had to maintain a tight grip on one handle and the opposite blade to keep the scissors open while getting the leverage needed to apply force to the rope, but it made actually getting free much harder. When he almost lost his grip on the scissors for the third time, Sherlock decided he would have preferred the cuts on his hands.

When his hands were finally free, Sherlock made quick work of the rest of the ropes and tried the door. Locked. Obviously. Apparently they weren’t completely stupid. Not that it mattered (mistake number five, not searching him). The two pieces of sturdy wire in his shoe were standard equipment and already fashioned into makeshift lock picks. Having them was so important that he had a backup in the form of another piece wrapped around the button of his trousers, in case his shoes were confiscated. That one wasn’t quite as sturdy and therefore less ideal for the job, but it would do in a pinch. Needless to say he was out of that room almost as fast as if he’d had a key.

He turned back one last time, trying to remember, but there was nothing new. He could remember the first line of cocaine, nothing unusual about it, quite pure, not quite as good as what he could do with a simple acid-base extraction, but decent stuff. Not quite enough to get him properly high either, but then that had been the plan. It stayed the plan until Alvaro suggested another line to stay on the wave and Sherlock suddenly realised he shouldn’t have admitted to liking it, he should have exaggerated some of the side effects, told Alvaro he found it unsettling, anything to make refusing another line plausible, because no one turned down another line if they are enjoying themselves, not if it was practically forced on them. After that things got blurry, he remembered Alvaro offering the third line, but not taking it, though he must have, because there hadn’t been anything wrong with the second line, so whatever he’d been dosed with apart from the cocaine must have happened after that. He doubted that he’d been drugged by force, because of the lack of defensive wounds. Maybe the third line had been laced with something? But why wait until the third line and risk him stopping before that? Alvaro had taken the cocaine out of his pocket, why risk his target noticing the switch if he could just have dosed him with the first line?

Unless he couldn’t.

Of course! The _third_ line! Not the second or the fourth. The third. Why the third? The second one had just been a top up when the first had started to wear off, not meant to change the intensity of the high, so it hadn’t been the dose that was important, it had to be the number.

Onions! Onion-taste meant sulphur compound, Sulphur compound meant distinct smell. He’d switched between nostrils, so after the second line his sense of smell would have been compromised. He wouldn’t have noticed the sulphur compound right under his nose, by then.

What sulphur compound? Just something to knock him out? Sherlock doubted it. That would be merely bad, because it meant that his cover had been blown, but he already had what he came for and he wouldn’t need to go in at another cartel. As long as he got out of here alive and in possession of all of his limbs, it would pretty much be the best case scenario for having his cover blown. And that didn’t sit right. He knew that this was worse. He had woken up convinced that this was the worst case. He wasn’t given to flights of fancy, so if he applied logic to his intuition and it didn’t leave, that usually meant that his subconscious knew something he didn’t and given the gap in his memory, that wasn’t just possible, but incredibly likely.

If he could just remember!

...maybe he could...

It was probably a bad idea.

...jog his memory...

Might not even work.

...recreating the circumstances...

It wouldn’t even be a complete recreation.

...of a memory...

John would probably disapprove.

...could call it to the surface...

Strike that.

...studying high only worked...

John would definitely disapprove.

...when you took the exam high too...

He really shouldn’t do this.

But the John in his mind stayed silent.

He needed to know.

It wasn’t like one more line would make a difference.

If anything it would make him sharper.

The stacked pallets had been removed but the unused packs were still there in their piles. It would be easy to take a few grams with him. Like lock-picks, evidence bags were part of the standard equipment. The theft would be noticed eventually, but if he hid the open pack at the bottom of the pile he’d be out of the country by then.

Sherlock left the factory with no one the wiser and settled down in an empty alleyway to try and jog his memory.

 

_“Another?”_

_“Isn’t that dangerous? Taking so much?”_

_“This isn’t much, and the last dose is already starting to wear off. You’re just riding the wave.”_

_“You sure?”_

_“Absolutely! Besides you have me to look after you and I’ve been doing this for years.”_

_“Alright.”_

_..._

_“So what do you think? Worth it?”_

_“This feels different...”_

_“Different batch, it’s purer.”_

_“No it isn’t, it’s cut.”_

_“How do you know?”_

_“I don’t.”_

_..._

_“Have you been living here all your life?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Ever left the country? Learned any languages?”_

_“No.”_

_“How about English?”_

_“I lef’ s’ool whe’ I wa’ twel’e. I don’ kno’ ‘nglish.”_

_“Sherlock Holmes.”_

_“Eh?”_

_“Thank you for your cooperation Mr Holmes.”_

 

No.

Nononononono.

He didn’t.

NO!

John.

Mrs Hudson.

Lestrade.

_John._

Mary was going to kill John.

Alvaro knew. Must have suspected from the beginning. Word from the other cartels? Probably. Did he miss someone? Possibly. Too late now.

He needed to save John.

How?

What to do, whattodowhattodowhattodo?

Stop them,

Stop Alvaro, find him, kill him, don’t let him contact anyone.

Where? Don’t know, might be too late already. Probably is.

Stop Mary. Have Mycroft kill her.

They’ll know. They’ll send someone else.

Stop Alvaro before he can. Might be too late. Who does he contact? Take them out. Always a step behind them, too slow.

Intercept the message. Where?

Warn John. Can’t protect him forever, she’ll get her chance eventually.

Stop Mary. StopmarystopmarystopmarySTOPMARY!

Stop money. No pay, no kill.

Is she loyal? Would she work without payment? Don’t know. Should know that by now. Mycroft’s job. Fuck Mycroft!

Stop it!

Concentrate!

You can stop this!

Solve it!

** Run statistics: **

**Options:**

Stop Alvaro.

Stop Message.

Warn John.

Stop Mary.

Stop Money.

**Sort by effectiveness in case of success:**

Stop Alvaro

| 

95%  
  
---|---  
  
Stop Message

| 

80%  
  
Stop Money

| 

50%  
  
Warn John

| 

35%  
  
Stop Mary

| 

15%  
  
**Sort by time sensitivity:**

Stop Alvaro

| 

Probably too late.  
  
---|---  
  
Stop Message

| 

Possibly too late.  
  
Stop Money

| 

Probably in time.  
  
Warn John

| 

In time.  
  
Stop Mary

| 

In time.  
  
**Sort by probability of success:**

Stop Money

| 

95%  
  
---|---  
  
Warn John

| 

90%  
  
Stop Mary

| 

75%  
  
Stop Message

| 

25%  
  
Stop Alvaro

| 

10%  
  
**Sort by accumulated success percentage**

Stop Money

| 

47.5%  
  
---|---  
  
Warn John

| 

31.5%  
  
Stop Message

| 

20%  
  
Stop Mary

| 

11.25%  
  
Stop Alvaro

| 

9.5%  
  
**Sort by resources needed:**

Data on Network:

| 

Emergency phone:  
  
---|---  
  
Stop Alvaro

| 

Stop Money  
  
Stop Message

| 

Warn John  
  
 

| 

Stop Mary  
  
**Assess availability:**

Data

| 

Partially saved in the mind palace: not enough to ensure success.

Laptop: secure location, estimated time for retrieval: 57 minutes.  
  
---|---  
  
Phone

| 

Different secure location: estimated time for retrieval: 73 minutes.  
  
 

Getting the laptop and finding Alvaro was out, there was no way it would take Alvaro more than an hour to contact whomever he needed to contact so Mary would kill John.

Oh God, Mary was going to kill John. NO! You can stop it! Think!

By the time he’d know where to start on intercepting the message, it would probably be too late for that too. However, he should probably look into wiping out the chain of command there, so the message couldn’t spread out further until someone realised that John was very much not dead and set out to rectify that. He’d do that once he’d exhausted the other options.

He’d need his emergency phone for all of those, so that was definitely the next step. He’d use the time it would take him to get there to decide what to do next.

Having Mary arrested or killed would definitely draw attention from the rest of the network, which might put John in even more danger, because then he wouldn’t even know who to watch out for anymore. At least this way he would know not to trust his killer. He should probably convince Mycroft to put both of them under more surveillance. Except, in light of the recent leaks, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea either. Any agent Mycroft put to the job might be one of Moriarty’s and put John in even more danger.

The last two options probably wouldn’t interfere with each other and combining them would raise the probability of success to an accumulative 64.0%. Which wasn’t horrible, Sherlock had bet on worse odds and won in the past, but it wasn’t good either. All those other times it had only been his life on the line. In fact, if the odds of surviving an encounter relatively unscathed had dropped below 75% he’d always made sure to go in alone.

It really all came down to how loyal Mary was to the network and how much pressure there would be on her to complete the job. If she was loyal and would work without payment, or if she had to fear for her own life, if she didn’t complete her contract, the probability of John’s survival would drop down to 31.5% (not even accounting for the additional fervour Mary would hunt John with if she was loyal, including that would lower it even further to around 10%). While if she didn’t actually want to kill John and wasn’t under too much scrutiny, or just not expected to kill without payment that would improve the probability up to 96.6% for John’s survival.

He’d call Mycroft first. The voice scrambling software on the phone would already be activated, the number on speed dial via fingerprint recognition, as was the norm for authorised phones. Despite his need to know that John was alright, stopping the money was more important, since it would take Mycroft some time to put things into motion and depending on how direct a route Alvaro’s message took and whether or not the transaction was marked as urgent, the window of opportunity might already be closing in about an hour. The extra minute it would take before he could warn John would barely increase the risk and while any increase was entirely unacceptable on principle, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Talking to John would take significantly longer than Mycroft and the chance of missing their opportunity with the money in that case was far higher than the accumulative chance of the message having taken one of the most direct possible routes, Mary being able to receive a message from the network at home instead of at work or by regularly checking a dead drop, Mary being awake at 3 am to receive the message (no spy worth their salt would use audible notifications for their secret messages when sharing the bed with the person they were spying on) and Mary being so loyal to the network that she wouldn’t even check whether she’d been paid, before executing her mark.

Thankfully the risk of calling John directly at all was orders of magnitude smaller than the risk of getting the message to him in a different, slower way. Sherlock didn’t know whether he’d be able to stand the uncertainty, if the outcome had been the other way around. He needed to know that John was alright. At least for now. As it was, the voice scrambling software would allow him to claim a wrong number if Mary picked up, and even if she should suspect something, she would learn that he was alive in a matter of hours anyway, if she didn’t already know. Unlike Mycroft’s, John’s number wouldn’t be in his phone, but he still knew it by heart, despite not having used it for almost two years.

Planning everything out barely occupied half of the journey. Afterwards there was nothing left to do but wait, unable to do anything to change the course of events, because everything depended on one variable he could neither calculate nor influence.

It was intolerable.

To make things worse the cocaine was already beginning to wear off, making him jittery and increasing his anxiety to a point where he soon wouldn’t be able to think clearly anymore.

Not thinking clearly wasn’t an option right now.

He needed to save John.

He didn’t have time for the crash.

He still had a pocket full of cocaine, enough to last for weeks, if he didn’t overdo it.

The John in his head made the decision far too easy, by staying silent once again.

John didn’t get a vote in matters concerning John’s safety.

He simply didn’t have time for withdrawal right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I probably spent more time researching for this chapter than writing it, trying to figure out how drug interactions work. I like biochemistry so at least I had fun doing that, even when I was despairing at the lack of proper research on certain topics. I also found the paper from the first time someone isolated cocaine in 1860, which was quite an interesting read.  
> I also did some more experimental, hands on research and went ahead and tied myself to a chair to try and see if I could escape the way I had Sherlock do it. I had to change some things afterwards (for example I had Sherlock cut himself on the scissors and then realised that its almost imossible to cut yourself with open scissors unless you are really dedicated), but it's all accurate now and I had fun in the process.


	24. Three Calls and a Mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it’s been a while. Sorry about that, real life has been horrifically busy lately. I’m hoping things will slow down a little now that the summer holidays are here, but I wouldn’t bet on it, because there’s still a million things I need to get done before the next term starts, so I’m not making any promises. 
> 
> Also the trigger warning for drug use still applies.

25\. 3. 2014, 19:17; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Alvaro’s foot was tapping on the floor. He was on edge, waiting for his contact to pick up the phone. The number he’d memorised was over two years old, just like the picture that had come with it. There was no telling if it was even still accurate, but they’d have informed him if it had changed, wouldn’t they? And his day had been going so splendidly until now. He’d been so sure that his hard work and his overlooked intelligence were finally paying off and he was on the verge of proving his worth to the new boss and securing his place in the new network. A better place than what he’d had before, the kind of place he deserved. At long last he would be known as a force to be reckoned with, someone to be respected, he’d get what was his due. He’d done everything right and everything had gone to plan, just like it was supposed to. He’d started to think that maybe the universe was a just place after all. He hadn’t even considered that he might fail now, and why, because of an obsolete phone number. No the number had to be right, the person on the other end had probably just left the room for a minute. Alvaro just had to keep trying.

It had been a rather clever move, if he said so himself, making sure he got put in charge of instructing all the new intakes when he heard that someone was infiltrating and unravelling parts of the network. He’d also put in a request for pictures of known undercover agents in the area. The network had a system of hackers and insiders in intelligence agencies all over the world that could work wonders if you knew who to call and what to say to them. As always, knowledge was power and Alvaro had made a point of collecting as much of it as possible. He’d expected to identify the mole before they could do any damage and get the credit for protecting his part of the network. He’d hoped that his talent would finally be recognised by the higher ups and that he’d get more responsibilities, more chances to shine and maybe more money too, but that last one was secondary, he was playing a longer game. He hadn’t expected to recognise the mole from somewhere else than the pictures of agents he’d memorised. He’d never even hoped to be the one to not only find, but catch the man, codename Henry, whose photo he’d only seen for a couple of seconds almost two years ago before the message had destroyed itself. But Alvaro had already known the face from the news back then. Among those in the know, and Alvaro made sure that he was always among those in the know, Sherlock Holmes was known as the Archenemy, the man who had killed the old boss and the new boss wanted him alive. Alvaro didn’t know why, not that he cared what happened to the Archenemy, but not knowing irked him. At least it wasn’t a problem in the case of the Archenemy. The same couldn’t be said for the mystery person who should pick up the phone any second now. Even if the person he was trying to reach wasn’t there, someone must have heard the phone by now. Maybe he’d misdialled? Alvaro was sure he hadn’t, but he redialled anyway. He didn’t even entertain the thought that he might have misremembered the number after two years. He didn’t make stupid mistakes like that. The sound of the phone ringing out was starting to grate on Alvaro’s nerves. What would he do if no one picked up this time? Leave his prisoner in the storage room over night, hope that no one found him and try again tomorrow morning? And if no one picked up at all? If he knew who he was calling, there wouldn’t be a problem. Alvaro knew enough about the information pathways of the network to get what he wanted, but for that to work he needed to know what he wanted, since everything was need-to-know only, and how much could you need to know someone’s current number if you didn’t even know who you were trying to call?

But unless the Archenemy had gotten there first, the number should still be accurate. Numbers like that usually didn’t change, for this very reason. If you changed them too often, at some point, someone would be overlooked and before you knew, you would be missing out on critical information and parts of the network would be left without guidance. Of course the actual recipient of the communication might change and the numbers were redirected regularly to throw off the authorities, but unless there was a radical change in the structure of the network, the number you had to call would stay the same. As far as Alvaro could tell, such a change hadn’t occurred. There hadn’t been any power struggle in the wake of the old boss being murdered that Alvaro had noticed, which meant that the succession must have been planned, so the new boss hadn’t been a rival of the old one but a confidant and would have known the old structures and kept them in place. That also meant that the Archenemy was still a threat, regardless of why he’d killed the boss. Whether he’d wanted justice to be served or to take the place of the boss, both of those scenarios would apply to the new boss too, so eliminating the threat would be the most prudent course of action and the new boss was nothing if not prudent in his decisions. There had been none of the former boss’s impulsivity in more recent orders, so why would he take the risk of trying to catch him alive, then? Maybe the Archenemy knew something, some secret the old boss hadn’t shared with anyone. There had been talk about a universal key-code around the time of the boss’s death, it had always sounded a little far fetched to Alvaro and when nothing had come of it, he’d congratulated himself on his good sense not to believe in fairytales, but maybe it did have something to do with that. Or it might be personal and the new boss wanted to have his revenge in person. It didn’t seem like the new boss’s style, but then Alvaro didn’t actually know anything about the new boss, hell, he only knew that the old boss was really dead, because he’d been clever enough to figure it out by himself from the subtle changes in the network. The official version of events was that the “Jim Moriarty” who had died on the roof had just been a figurehead, just a double to stand in for the real boss when things got dicey.

And now that he’d caught his quarry all his dreams were just one phone call away, if the person on the other end would only “Pick up the fucking phone!” the last part was hissed into the still beeping receiver and Alvaro was just drawing breath to continue voicing his frustration to no one, when there was a crackle at the other end and the beeping finally stopped.

_“Yes?”_ Alvaro rallied himself quickly, despite breaking out in a cold sweat over the fact that he’d almost greeted someone who was most likely his superior with a stream of invective and answered: “Henry’s here.” What followed was a quickfire exchange of information in one of the simpler codes the network only used when they had a secure connection. If someone listened in, they wouldn’t have much of a problem getting the gist of the conversation, but any names and locations were well disguised. Alvaro had had this kind of conversation often enough, that he didn’t have to think about his answers.

_“Status?”_

“Fixed.”

_“Post?”_

“White Star candy store.”

_“Calle Monterrey 45.”_

And done. Brilliant! A smile stole itself on Alvaro’s face for the first time since his first call hadn’t gone through. He had a time and a place where he would get his instructions on what to do with his prisoner and probably some resources too, judging by where the meeting was set up. Calle Monterrey was the code for one of the bars the cartel owned which was most definitely not located in the Calle Monterrey. It was a front for an underground storage area and a safe house. The man in charge was also part of the network, so it served as a double base and point of exchange. Alvaro had been there before, mostly when he was just starting out in his career, of course, nowadays he had enough influence to get someone else to make the trip if he needed something. Of course this was too sensitive an issue to leave to some lackey, so this time he’d have to make the trip himself. Most likely some of the muscle stationed there would come with him to help move his prisoner. If the plan wasn’t to move him they wouldn’t just have asked if he was captured, but also whether the current mode of imprisonment was sustainable. Alvaro knew that sometimes the things that weren’t said were more important than the things that were and he’d made reading between the lines into an art form. There was also a chance that the safe house was currently occupied by someone more important than the man in charge from the network and that was the reason Alvaro had been called there, to get a full debrief and maybe even a promotion. He still had some time before he had to leave for the meeting, his prisoner was likely still unconscious, and therefore there was nothing to be gained checking on him, so Alvaro used the time putting on his nicest suit, which he’d bought with the extra money he’d earned working directly for the network in addition to the cartel and which he was storing in his locker in the factory. After all it never hurt to look at least as competent as he was when talking to a superior, and even if his guess turned out to be wrong and all that was waiting for him at the meeting were a couple of thugs to help him subdue his prisoner, looking his best wouldn’t hurt, as it would put him in a position of authority over them that he might not have otherwise if they were getting their instructions from elsewhere.

Alvaro left the factory with a sense of accomplishment and looking forward to the great things that were to come.

* * *

 

26\. 3. 2014, 02:57; London, UK

Mycroft hadn’t been asleep for more than two hours when his phone rang. His _work phone_. The untraceable one with seven layers of encryption that could only be called directly from 9 authorised phones, while everyone else would be redirected and questioned, the call traced before being put through. The phone that never left his person, that he never turned off or even silenced. The phone that would be used to inform him of the impending apocalypse.

Despite operating on two hours of sleep after twenty hours of work, he was instantly awake and answered on the third ring.

“Holmes.” No need for codenames, if you were calling this number directly, and according to the ring tone the caller was, you knew who you were calling.

_“Stop the transactions,”_ An order, no greeting, no context, voice changed artificially to sound like all the other agents. Sherlock, then, everyone else would at least identify themselves. _“Now.”_ The word was bitten out, urgency audible even after going through the voice scrambling software. Very urgent then. Mycroft hadn’t been expecting the request, either. That particular move shouldn’t happen for another three months in the best case scenario. Could his brother really have surpassed all his expectations and found a quicker way to get rid of the key players? It was unlikely, but not impossible. The last time he’d spoken to Sherlock had been two months ago and they’d agreed then that Mycroft wouldn’t try to keep track of his movements, so he wouldn’t inadvertently tip off their mole. Sherlock requested money from unconnected locations between missions and got his identities from the same dead drops as every other agent and sometimes information about criminal organisations that were probably connected to the network turned up in those places too. Never older than a week at the time they were found, but always at least three days old, sometimes in countries completely unrelated to the organisation in question, long lists of names, places and times that enabled them to take down the cells. No one but Mycroft knew the likely source of those goldmines and even Mycroft had no idea where the source might be by the time they received the intel. Mycroft simply didn’t have enough data to know where his brother was at the moment and since Sherlock didn’t use that method for all the cells he toppled, it wasn’t clear how close he was to finishing his mission either.

“You can’t possibly be that far along already.”

“ _Irrelevant.”_ That was a ‘no’ then. _“I_ need _you to stop all of their transactions right now.”_ There were only a handful of scenarios in which they’d considered blocking the transfer of money inside the network prematurely. In every single one of them Sherlock was in trouble. Or maybe Sherlock was overreacting. It had happened a few times in the very beginning, Sherlock thinking he’d seen someone do a double take, believing he’d been recognized, but nothing had ever come of it.

“You know, there will be consequences. An additional two months at least, and then there’s Serbia. Are you sure this is absolutely necessary?”

_“Yes. Just do it”_ He’d expected Sherlock to lay out the situation in broad terms for him to fill in the details and to judge, maybe a short discussion, not ice-cold doubt-free determination and no information at all. He considered asking for it, but in the mood Sherlock seemed to be in right now he wasn’t likely to answer. Also Mycroft Holmes didn’t _ask_ for information, usually it was _offered_ to him. He shouldn’t have stopped keeping tabs on Sherlock. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, not giving the mole anything to work with, but that had been when Mycroft had assumed he’d find whoever it was in a matter of days, a few weeks at most. It had turned out to be much more difficult than expected, and then Russia had taken over Crimea and Mycroft had been overtaken by a veritable avalanche of work that barely left him with any time to eat or sleep, let alone trying to find an elusive mole. Speaking of sleep, depending on the temporal urgency, it might not be such a bad idea to get some more before tackling the day.

“It’s 3 am, can it wait until morning?” Mycroft really hoped it could, because he hadn’t got more than four hours of sleep a night for over a month now and while under normal circumstances he could function perfectly fine on only two the built up deficit was already starting to show on its own. If this was as serious as he thought, being sleep deprived on top of being swamped with official work was a recipe for disaster.

_“No. It needs to be right now.”_ It appeared that it would be a miserable day after all. Mycroft reluctantly left the warm comfort of his bed while already rearranging his schedule for the day. Stopping the transactions wasn’t enough, if Sherlock was in trouble, Mycroft had to be ready to extract him if need be, which would be rather difficult considering he didn’t know where Sherlock was at the moment (that was the trouble with those untraceable phones, they were, well, untraceable), so he’d have to follow his trail from his last known location. Doing so might tip off the mole, depending on how much access they had to Mycroft’s movements, but Sherlock’s cover was likely already blown anyway. All in all Mycroft had about four extra hours of work to fit into a day that was only two hours longer than usual. He debated whether he should call his assistant in early too, as things would move faster if she was there, but she wasn’t informed about the entire situation. She only knew that there was a top-secret agent dismantling Moriarty’s network, but not who that agent was. He’d have to be extra careful to keep anything resembling worry off his face if she was there. On the other hand, if it turned out that he had to organise Sherlock’s extraction from whatever mess he got himself into, having her by his side might make all the difference.

“Anything else?” What he really meant was: Do I need to come and get you? An offer, if made explicit, Sherlock wouldn’t accept unless he didn’t see another way out. However, if he asked for resources, it would give Mycroft the information he needed to find him much faster than he could otherwise.

_“Protect them. Please.”_ Sherlock being more concerned about everyone else’s safety than his own was par for the course, so this didn’t tell him much, but Mycroft hoped that this meant he at least wasn’t in immediate danger. 

* * *

 

Just like Mycroft before him, John was woken up in the middle of the night, by his phone. Mary was blinking herself awake next to him so he almost subconsciously tilted the display away from her while he squinted at it, trying to make out the caller-ID on the far too bright display.

_Unknown Number_

John was suddenly far more awake. Unknown numbers, calling in the in the middle of the night, were never, ever good.

He answered the call: “Hello, John Watson speaking.”

“Is this John Hamish Watson?”

“Yes, that’s me,” John answered automatically, before he registered the use of his middle name, or the fact that he’d already said his name.

“I’m calling from Brighton and Sussex University Hospital, you’re listed as the emergency contact for Harriet Watson.” For a single second there were two realities fighting for dominance in John’s head. One: Harry was in hospital and they were calling him in the middle of the night, which they didn’t do unless it was really, truly serious. Two: This wasn’t the hospital calling. Both realities were cause for panic.

“Oh my god, what happened?” John was reacting to reality one, the obvious reality, the reality he was supposed to react to, while his mind was racing with the implications of the last two sentences. Of course it might have been a coincidence, and Harry really was in hospital. But what would she be doing in Brighton anyway?

“Your sister suffered an anaphylactic shock, luckily she had her EpiPen on her.” Harry didn’t suffer from any severe allergies, of course it was possible for an allergy to manifest every time one came into contact with an allergen, but she definitely wouldn’t have been carrying an EpiPen. Reality one wasn’t quite adding up anymore, which meant that reality two was becoming increasingly likely. Which meant that Sherlock was in trouble, because ‘Hamish’ was one of their codewords for the most desperate of situations. To be used when there was no secure line of communication and a word out of place could mean death. And standing in his bedroom in his underwear, observed by a, by now fully awake, assassin, talking on a phone that said assassin had had the opportunity to bug on multiple occasions in the six months they’d been living together, was the very definition of an insecure line of communication. Now it was John’s job to confirm it was Sherlock on the other end and find out what he was supposed to do without rousing Mary’s suspicions. At least Sherlock, if it really was him, had left him a perfect opening for that.

“Is she going to be alright? Harriet, is she...” John had made a point of occasionally calling Harry by her full name in front of Mary, so it wouldn’t seem forced, when he used it as code. Sherlock had come up with the concept of using names they wouldn’t normally use as a code to reveal and verify their identities to each other over a year ago when they’d met up at the conference in Hawaii after Mary had first kissed John. In this case John using ‘Harriet’ was meant to subtly tell Sherlock that yes, John knew who he was talking to and if it really was Sherlock on the other end, he’d –

“Your sister Harry –” Bingo, the hospital wouldn’t know her nickname and even if they did, because Harry told them, they wouldn’t use it after John had called her Harriet. John only half listened to the explanation of Harry’s fake condition, while he tried to figure out what Sherlock wanted him to do. Being on his guard, definitely but beyond that? Maybe come to the hospital Harry was supposed to be in, they’d done the hurt-loved-one-code before, after all.

“...She’s been asking for you...”

And there was his confirmation. He’d be ‘visiting Harry’.

“I’ll take the first train in the morning” Meaning: ‘Or should I take the car?’ It would of course make it easier to get to wherever Sherlock needed him, but it almost certainly had a tracker hidden somewhere which would make going anywhere but Brighton tricky.

“We’ll call you if anything changes.” No dissent and probably a reminder to take the burner phone with him so they could talk properly, but he would have done that anyway.

Once he’d ended the call, John explained reality one to Mary, asking her to make his excuses at the surgery, while he frantically packed a bag and looked up train schedules. Thankfully trains started going early, the first train of the day leaving in a little under an hour. John would just be able to make it if he hurried and took a cab. Which was good, because going back to bed was not an option. Whatever else that call from Sherlock was, John was sure that it had been a warning to be on his guard and that definitely meant not going back to sleep and if at all possible to not let anyone, especially Mary, catch him flat footed, which meant lying down was not the best idea. So he told Mary that there was no way he could go to sleep now anyway, so he might as well leave as early as possible.

Mary stayed up with him, whether out of mistrust or concern he didn’t know. John wished she wouldn’t, though, because having her underfoot was making it difficult to think and plan his next steps.

As soon as he was done, John left the house with a sigh of relief. He hoped his show of frantic worry had been believable as it was what had enabled him to leave early enough to stop by the bolt hole and pick up the burner phone without missing the train and made it believable to forget his phone charger so he could go incommunicado without raising any alarms. He had a spare one hidden away together with the burner phone and his fake documents so he could still decide whether he wanted his phone to work later. 

* * *

 

25\. 3. 2014, 21:50; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

The second time Alvaro left the factory that day was far less triumphant than the first, instead cold dread was coursing through his veins and settling in his stomach. The prisoner was gone and had taken Alvaro’s future with him. There had in fact been a meeting with one of the higher ups from the network, both promises and threats had been made. Alvaro had presented them with pictures as proof that he had in fact caught the Archenemy. Not that it mattered, failure and deception were treated as one and the same by the network’s enforcers. The thugs accompanying him were there as much to keep an eye on Alvaro as they were to help with the prisoner, at least they had been before they’d encountered the open door of the makeshift prison. Once it had become clear that their bird had flown, their focus had shifted to Alvaro and he’d been reduced to pleading. He could fix this, if they just gave him some time, he’d recover the prisoner, e couldn’t have gotten too far.

Almost an hour and far too many CCTV tapes later, Alvaro was proven wrong. His prisoner had escaped before he himself had even left for the meeting. If he’d checked on him instead of giving in to vanity, he would have caught him in the act of escaping. That chance had passed more than two hours ago, there was no telling where Sherlock Holmes was by now.

Once that had become clear, the thugs had ended his grace period by forcefully escorting him from the factory. Alvaro was coming quietly. He wasn’t much of a fighter, sure, he could hold his own but his true weapon was his mind and against two men, each a full head taller than him and with arms as thick as Alvaro’s legs, he didn’t stand a chance. He was biding his time, maybe he’d be able to negotiate his way out of this, once he got to the higher ups.

Alvaro was busy making plans, while he was being marched through the factory towards the main entrance. As dire as his situation was, he still had one ace up his sleeve. He had information no one else had, information about Sherlock Holmes and if they wanted to catch him, they needed that information. Right now they only had the proof that he was alive and had infiltrated the network, they didn’t know his modus operandi or anything really that would help them find him again. Alvaro on the other hand had spent hours with the man and he’d been paying attention and therefore had several good guesses where he might turn now that he’d escaped. He also knew where he’d been staying. Alvaro didn’t think Holmes was stupid enough to go back there, but he’d been expecting to return. Therefore chances were that there was still evidence lying around that might tell them more about his plans. Even if there wasn’t, they could interrogate the family he’d been living with, they might have instructions about what to do if he didn’t return that could provide further information. All this was information that Alvaro and no one else possessed, he just had to make sure he didn’t sell it cheap and he could still save this, provided they were successful in re-capturing Holmes.

A street urchin, who’d been sitting next to the entrance jumped up and scurried away as quickly as he could when he saw them coming towards the gate. Clever kid, site security didn’t take kindly to loiterers, no matter how young. Once they were outside the factory boundaries Alvaro’s guards seized his arms. Doing so inside the factory would have been too conspicuous, since most of the workers knew his face, even though he hadn’t been on the night shift in years. Seeing him removed by force would have raised questions at the very least. Now that they’d left the premises though, the chances of running into someone who knew Alvaro had decreased dramatically and making sure he didn’t escape apparently took precedence. Not that it mattered, since Alvaro had already decided that escape wasn’t his best option. Still, he’d prefer not to be manhandled like this.

They were almost at the car they’d used to get to the factory when Alvaro heard something behind them. He started to turn his head, but before he could see what it was, several things happened at once. The grip on his right arm tightened – noise – then fell away, he was tugged to the other side by the remaining hand on his arm, – more noise – gunshots his mind finally supplied – and he found himself on the ground, ears ringing and disoriented, not sure what had just happened, just that it was probably going to be bad for him. Before Alvaro could fully assess his changed situation someone stepped up behind him and for the second time in less than a minute Alvaro turned around, this time willing to fight for his life, but before he even saw his attacker something collided with his head and –.

The first thing Alvaro registered was pain. Starting at his head and radiating through his whole body making him wish he hadn’t woken up. At least until he tried to assess the damage with carefully probing fingers and found that he couldn’t. In fact he couldn’t move at all. Restrained. Tied to a chair to be precise, a mirror image to how he’d left Holmes just a few hours? Probably just a few hours ago, he didn’t know how long he’d been out, but surely it couldn’t have been all that long. He seemed to be alone at least he couldn’t hear anyone in the room with him. Carefully opening his eyes confirmed that. Good, he needed to get out of here before whoever had taken him came back. Holmes had just escaped from this very situation, so how difficult could it be? First step, get rid of the ropes. Unfortunately the only trick he knew for escaping ropes was to tense his muscles while being tied up so there would be more give to them later on. Bit late for that. Alvaro wriggled a bit to figure out how much give there was to his restraints, but there was next to none. The ropes were wrapped around his legs over the whole length of the chair legs in a way that kept his heels an inch above the ground so he couldn’t get any leverage there and his thighs were tied down to the seat while his hips and shoulders were fastened to the back of the chair, making it impossible for him to remove any part of himself from the surface of the chair. He couldn’t even get enough leverage or momentum to make the chair wobble. He scanned the room for anything that might help him escape, but there was nothing. It was a bare nondescript room the likes of which might be found in any of the cheap blocks of flats that surrounded the factory, but that didn’t mean that he was actually close to the site of the assault since these kinds of rooms existed almost anywhere. The only furniture was the chair Alvaro was sitting in. There was absolutely nothing that might help him escape.

Anything else he could try depended on who had taken him and what they wanted. There were multiple possibilities. A rival cartel, most likely the Cártel del Golfo, Cártel de Sinaloa or La familia trying to get enough information to take over some of their territory was only one of the possibilities. Alvaro would be a prime target for that, high enough in the hierarchy to be useful, but not important enough to inspire acts of vengeance when he disappeared. That was probably the best case scenario, since, if he was clever and useful enough, he might be able to change sides, lie low for a while. They would distrust him at first of course, but give it enough time he might be able to introduce them to the network. As far as Alvaro knew the network had always been willing to expand its partnerships and they were an invaluable resource. That way he might be able to get into the good graces of both parties. It was a plan to keep in the back of his head just in case it became useful later.

The guards that had been killed in the ambush were part of the network, so even though they probably weren’t happy with him right now, they wouldn’t kill their own people just to get to him, especially since he’d already been in their power.

Who else? Alvaro had risen through the ranks, both of the cartel and the network, quickly, so obviously he’d made some personal enemies. To a certain extent that was inevitable, but he hadn’t expected this kind of violent retribution from any of them. A quick bullet to the head, maybe, but a kidnapping? While he was under armed guard? No.

So a rival cartel probably. He could work with that.

Except that it wasn’t a rival cartel as Alvaro realised very quickly as soon as the door opened and Sherlock Holmes strode in looking dishevelled but entirely too alert for having been drugged to the gills just a few hours ago and talking a mile a minute.

“Good, you’re awake. Finally! I’ve been waiting for ages, well technically it’s only been – “ a quick look at his phone “- a bit over an hour, 73 minutes to be exact, but it felt like forever! I thought you might wake up before I got back, that’s why I tied you up properly, not like you did with me. Really one would think you never had to restrain anyone, didn’t even take me half an hour to escape. If you’d done it the way I did, I wouldn’t have had a chance. You could have won so easily, I made one mistake, I took the cocaine and you had me at your mercy, but then you messed up. I counted five separate mistakes, though two of them applied twice so maybe seven in all. See how you can’t move at all? And how there are no scissors lying around anywhere? And how I took everything from you that might have helped you escape? You even left me my lockpicks, you don’t even have any lockpicks on you, what kind of third class criminal are you, no lockpicks. No lockpicks! Would you even know how to use them? Anyway, where was I? Right, you see how you’re completely unable to escape? That’s how it’s done, try to remember it for next time.” Apparently something about that amused Holmes, as he started giggling and repeating “Next time” over and over again. Christ, the man was still high as a kite. Then as quick as it had started the deranged giggling was gone and replaced by a laser sharp focus.

“Now you have a choice. There’s a plane I’d really like to catch. It’s leaving tomorrow night. If I miss it, quite a few of my plans will be severely delayed and as a result I will be quite cross. With you in particular, because whether I catch that plane depends entirely on how cooperative you are. If you are helpful and give me all the information I want in time, I’ll leave you unhurt and make sure someone finds you soon after I’ve left the country so you don’t accidentally starve to death. No one has to get hurt. However, if you make me miss that plane, I will have all the time in the world to get the information out of you the hard way. So which will it be?”

“I have friends that will miss me. Powerful friends. They’ll find me soon and you’ll be in a world of trouble.” It might not be true, strictly speaking, but Holmes couldn’t know that.

“Powerful friends, huh? Tell me, do you mean Los Zetas or the network. No don’t answer, it doesn’t matter. The cartel won’t miss you until tomorrow morning, when they’ll first assume you’re late, then that you’re playing hooky. They won’t find anything amiss until later in the day, when the arrests and raids start. Imagine my surprise when I woke up tied up, but still in possession of the documents I came for. Doesn’t get much more incompetent than that, you really should have searched me when I was unconscious. Anyway, when they don’t hear from you the day after tomorrow, they’ll assume you’ve sold them out and fled. I made sure to leave some evidence of that in your office when I stopped by, too, so they won’t even second guess it. You’re right, they will come looking for you, but they won’t come to your rescue. Do tell me what they do to those who double-cross them?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, how could everything have gone wrong so spectacularly so quickly? His only hope was that the network found him before the cartel and he could convince them to protect him. Of course, there would only be a chance for that as long as he kept his mouth shut and if he somehow managed to help them actually capture Holmes, maybe –

“And the network? Well, they’re probably already looking for you, since your guards failed to drag you to their doorstep. They’ll find the dead guards and a crime scene that looks like you managed to grab one of their guns, killed them and fled in order to escape judgement for allowing me to slip away. So they’ll also be looking for you, but not to rescue you either, and neither of them will be looking in any of the right places since they’ll both assume that you’re still running instead of already caught. I told you, we have all the time in the world.”

No, this simply couldn’t be true there was no way Holmes had done all that while Alvaro had been unconscious. He had to be bluffing, no one could be this good. The man was high for god’s sake! He couldn’t, he just couldn’t...

“You’re bluffing,” Alvaro said with a conviction he didn’t feel, hoping to see some evidence of unease on Holmes’ face, something that would tell Alvaro that Holmes needed him to confess quickly. If Holmes was running out of time maybe Alvaro could strike a deal with him that would get him out of the ropes and once he was out he’d be able to follow him and overpower him when he wasn’t expecting it, which should get him back into favour with the network and then he could warn the cartel about the breach, preventing most of the damage there. If he left out his own involvement in Holmes getting his hands on those documents he’d be the hero there too –. But Holmes only smirked and shrugged.

“You want to call my bluff and wait it out? Fine with me, wait for me to miss my plane and we’ll see how much you believe yourself then. Oh, and if I get impatient, there’s always this.” Holmes pulled something from the pocket of his jeans, not even pausing his speech. “I wanted to know what you’d drugged me with, just to make sure there wouldn’t be any unpleasant surprises later, I already had to go back to make sure your office looked appropriately fled from anyway and look what I found in your locker.” Holmes held up the little packet of yellowish white powder he’d taken from his trousers and Alvaro struggled not to burst into laughter, better not to anger his captor, but it was just so ridiculous to be threatened with a ‘truth serum’. Even though there was little chance, that he’d actually spill anything useful, he’d rather not be dosed, so maybe there was some merit in disabusing Holmes of his misconceptions after all.

“The Pentothal? You do realise that stuff doesn’t really work like in the movies?”

“So it really was only sodium thiopental, not something novel the network cooked up. In that case, I’m well aware of its limitations but it still has its uses. And you know that, otherwise why use it on me?”

How much should he reveal? Being cooperative now might help him conceal more important secrets later. What could it hurt if Holmes knew how Alvaro had got him? It wasn’t like he’d get another chance at interrogating Holmes. The interrogations afterwards really were the most useful thing about so called truth serums, because of the amnesia they caused you could easily convince the subject that they’d revealed more than they had under the influence and thereby prompt a fuller confession. It was a moot point in this case though, since there wouldn’t be another interrogation.

“Oh, it was perfectly fine for that situation. I wasn’t after any novel information, I only needed to make sure that you’re not who you said you were and that’s simple. I switched over to English once you were under enough and you kept answering, despite your claims not to understand the language. Well and then you reacted to your name. That sealed it.”

Damn it, Holmes looked entirely too happy about what Alvaro had told him, like he hadn’t expected to get so much information out of him. He had to be more careful about how much he revealed. Or he could try and win Holmes over. If what Holmes had said about the cartel and the network was true he needed new allies anyway if he wanted to stay alive. Of course Holmes might still kill him once he got the information he wanted and Alvaro wasn’t useful to him any longer, but that was always a possibility no matter what he did. He could refuse to talk, be tortured, eventually talk anyway and then be killed either by Holmes or because he was cast out in the streets right in the heart of Los Zetas’ power. He could offer up just enough information for Holmes to set him free, assuming he kept his word, and still be all alone and hunted by both the network and the cartel. Both were probably suicide. It was time for a new plan. A new alliance. There were worse possibilities for protection than someone who had been hunted by the network for almost two years and was still alive and had apparently been taking down parts of it the whole time. Holmes must have some help of course, no one could do all of that alone, but it was still quite impressive when you knew the kinds of resources the network had at its disposal. Of course now that Alvaro had found him and informed the network of his continued survival and whereabouts, that might change and put Holmes in more danger and therefore he’d be less able to provide protection, but that also meant that he was in need of someone who knew the ins and outs of the network to help him evade them and maybe take out some of the information chain to make sure the knowledge of his whereabouts didn’t get much further. Alvaro could be that person, he could be useful and get himself out of this mess. He just had to make sure he stayed useful to Holmes. And if it looked like Holmes might want to get rid of him, he could always betray him to get back into favour with the network.

New plan decided on, Alvaro smiled at Holmes: “I think we could be very useful to each other. So what do you want to know?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone figures out how I chose Sherlock’s codename, I will be impressed. 
> 
> So truth serums don't work like in the movies, which I think everyone is more or less aware of, but how useless they actually are still kind of disappointed me (and meant I had to rework a lot of the plot for this story arc). It's also really difficult to find any proper research on them in the context I needed it. The most helpful thing I could find was a report from the CIA from the sixties that was only declassified about ten years ago. So basically all the information I used might be totally outdated, but it's probably still more scientifically accurate than the actual show so I'll take it.
> 
> Also figuring out timelines with different time zones is really annoying.


End file.
